My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.

Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.