“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.”

“The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.”

“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.”

“I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memorie...”

“I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room”

“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.”

“We all have the same root, and are connected...To tap into this connectedness we must go within.”

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

“I'd rather be on the ground than underTo feel the heavy rain and the thunder.”