30 quotes found
“No one can take what's inside your head once it's there.”
“You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.”
“We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.”
“You shouldn't rush, he said. There are no taste buds in your stomach.”
“But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”
“She knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse.”
“The girl's face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger th...”
“She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns”
“Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.”
“Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.”
“Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.”
“We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”
“the absence isnt immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the p...”
“The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee...”
“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”
“The look on his face told her what had happened and that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was. Love, she learned, c...”
“He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of ma...”
“On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or as they were known locally, the government.”
“If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramazan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and...”
“... hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.”
“Carrying that lumber the forty meters from the forest had left his knuckles blistered, his underarms sopping, but now a few hours of flames had lifted what had taken him months to design, weeks to ...”
