The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.