12 quotes found
“Dont worry, my friend. I wont let you die. I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.”
“Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”
“It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.”
“He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldnt share them all at once.”
“Perhaps a hero is someone who doesnt register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if youre too daft to know youre mortal?”
“She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.”
“The front door is usually unlocked and there is no alarm system. They don't wear their seat belts in the car; they don't wear suntan lotion in the sun. They have decided nothing can kill them but G...”
“Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic de...”
“I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others ev...”
“That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't ...”
“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow, began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. Wants to see how theyre getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. Tell me, comrade, he asks on...”