“My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and sho...”

“The only way to learn who you are is to leave home.”

“Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and dont ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. T...”

“From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it mad...”

“Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories”

“Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her minds eye, was an image of the two of them dan...”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”

“When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselve...”

“It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.”

“Your voice has haunted every inch of my soul since the last time I heard itmy world had been so dark, void of sound and then I heard you sing againand it exploded. Everything came crashing down on ...”

“Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you...”

“We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capa...”

“In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shir...”