Quotes from Daphne Kalotay

She looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.

It wasn't that she didn't believe in love; but she no longer believed in it for herself.

there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.

No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone.

It was the comfort of knowing that she was not quite so strange, that there were other people who found delight in private challenges and quiet lives. People who lived in their thoughts as much as in the real, physical world.

Even the grandest lives come down to a few people and places. Loved ones, your daily work, your neighborhood. I don't mean that in a belittling way. I've been realizing how complete our lives can be with just the few people and activities you most love.

Just like with love. It's all or nothing. ... That's why love is dangerous. We stand up for love. We take risks. Well, you of all people know about that - your own Soviet Russia, an entire nation rearranged to discourage love for anything other than one's country.' Because love caused people to think for themselves, to look out for themselves and their loved ones.

I remember when I left Hungary," Zoltan said, "understanding so completely that literature could save me as much as it could get me killed. Of course it's not like that here. But isn't it funny, that in some ways the price one pays for freedom of speech is ... a kind of indifference.

How lucky Drew was to have this mother of hers, this constant, reliable, if at times irritating presence in her life--this mother, like so many other mothers, beloved and blamed. Lucky she was to have experience, through her mother, the twisted intricaciesof deep, and deeply complex, love.

she immediately became the person they believed her to be: a peculiar, impatient girl, attractive enough yet too old and odd for the village boys who had once been her friends.

He had insinuated himself into Nina's life in a gentle, measured way, through small gifts and intelligent, respectful notes. His attention was never overbearing, nor disturbingly selfless, but wise and reserved.

the way the diamond caused people to reasses her--their palpable appreciation that Drew was loved by someone, was someone worth loving

if you just let things be, they eventually sort themselves out.

Pretty much all my life I've wondered about my birth parents, wondered who they were, what they were like. But since I had my children, I don't wonder anymore. Because I look at my kids, and I can see the answer. It's right there in their features, in who they are. Everything that isn't Rick and his family must be from my side. It's my kids who are finally showing me where I come from.

She knew then, if without the words to express it, that what she was studying was not simply music but beauty, and that she wanted to inhabit, completely, that beauty—and

Bolshoi…A mother's life, one long errand. One enormous chore.

Što god ti rekao, vjeruješ u ljubav. Potrebna ti je. Jednoga dana srest ?eš ženu pred kojom ?eš se rastopiti kad je vidiš. Poželjet ?eš svakog trenutka u danu biti s njom. Stari moj, u želatinu ?eš se pretvoriti.

Your problem is that you're Russian - you don't know how to be happy.

Certain feelings and actions become decisions, rather than the other way around.

the comfort of knowing that she was not quite so strange, that there were other people who found delight in private challenges and quiet lives. People who lived in their thoughts as much as in the real, physical world.

It is as if all four of them are waiting something out, as if none of them wants the night to end. Morning has sprouted, pale and winking, by the time they say goodbye.

The water is surprisingly warm. When she dives in, she feels herself enveloped. Reemerging, she leans back, lifts her feet, and floats on her back. Above her the sky is dark black, an endless stretch dotted with tiny stars. The sound of night, the thick, rich quiet - and the hooting, every few minutes, of an owl.

She senses, for the first time, how far away one can be from one's own life, how contentedly distant. The gaping enormity of the universe, its endless possibility… She feels it, an aura, an inkling - the illusion of absolute freedom.

But Drew liked the simplicity of her downsized life, this quieter existence. One needed, she saw now, only a few belongings, just as one needed only a few close friends, and a single passion - it need not be a person, necessarily.