Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.

I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn't born into it.

Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her.

Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.

Courage, Alexander..... Courage, Tatiana

I'll take your breath any way you give it to me, Shura.

Alexander knew that before he had light instead of darkness, he had to deserve light instead of darkness.