“How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considere...”

“I'm afraid of freedom, it feels like some drunk guy could show up and burn my dacha at any moment.”

“Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.”

“Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked ...”

“Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri tur...”

“Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well.”

“A drunken but exceedingly depressed German clown from Munich entertained the public.”

“He longed to revenge himself on everyone for his own unseemliness”

“And it has always been a mystery, and I've marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul alongside the grea...”

“Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.”

“In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's jo...”

“Old stories sometimes slid out of her like lamp oil or light, stories containing details oblique and nearly incomprehensible to me or to anyone who has never known that world.”