Quotes from Paullina Simons

I want amnesia! I want a fucking lobotomy. Could I please never think again? Look what's happened to us, us, Tania. Don't you remember how we used to be? Just look what's happened.

You have amazing gifts. Don't squander them. Don't give them out meaninglessly, don't abuse them, don't take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die. -Tatiana and Alexander

The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

The sunshine filtered in through the billowing white curtains. Tatiana knew there would be only an instant, a brief flicker of time that bathed her with the possibilities of the day. In a moment it would all be gone. And in a moment it was. Still...that sun streaking through the room, the distant rumble of buses through the open window, the slight wind. This was the part of Sunday that Tatiana loved most: the beginning.

Up on the roof Tatiana thought about the evening minute, the minute she used to walk out the factory doors, turn her head to the left even before her body turned, and look for his face. The evening minute as she hurried down the street, her happiness curling her mouth upward to the white sky, the red wings speeding her to him, to look up at him and smile.

During the day she carried her boy, bandaged and fed the wounded, leaving her own festering wounds until night-time when she licked them and nursed them, and remembered the pines and the fish and the river and the ase and the woods and the fire and the blueberries and the smell of cigarette smoke and the loud laughter coming from one male throat.

Tania, when I found you, I felt for that hour or two we were together - before Dimitri, before Dasha - that somemhow I was going to right my life." Alexander smiled bitterly. "I had a sense of hope and destiny that I can neither explain nor understand.

Though outwardly Kristina maintained that a clean room was a symptom of a diseased mind (for how could she, while studying the world's greatest thinkers, be bothered with such mundane earthly issues as cleaning?), inwardly she hated untidyness and made a point of spending as little time in the room as possible.

But first my feet will freeze and then my legs and then my insides, they will all turn to ice. And my blood, too, and my heart, and I will forget.

Tatiana knew that she belonged irrevocably to Alexander. She thought she could extricate herself from him, that she could go on with her life somehow, that he could go on with is. It was all a sham. This wasn't a way of getting over a passing crush on your older sister's swain. This was the moon of Jupiter and the sun of Venus aligning in the sky over her head.

What a prison you have set up for me with your first love." She put her arms tighter around him and said teasingly, "Oh, so the first love part you believe, but the first kiss part you have a problem with? What kind of girl do you think I am?" "The nicest girl," he whispered.

Alexander looked into the barrel of one of the guns. He blinked. O God, please look after Tania all alone in the world.

I just don't know how I'm going to survive you, Tatiana.

She held the money to her chest and tried to fathom Alexander's heart. He was the man who, a few meters away from freedom, from America , had chosen to turn his back on his lifelong drea. Feel one way. Behave one way, too. Alexander may have hoped for America , but he believed more in him-self. And he loved Tatiana most of all. Alexander knew who he was. He was a man who kept his word. And he had given it to Dimitri.

When Tatiana had been a child in Luga, her beloved Deda, seeing her depressed one summer and unable to find her way, said to her, 'Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: what do you believe in? What do you hope for? But most important - ask, what do you love?

they say, he's mine, and you say, all right, all right, he's yours, of course, take him. Nothing matters to me at all. Not me, not my food, not my bread, not my life, and not him either, nothing matters to me." "I ,Tatiana, fight for nothing

You want to know what I thought of in that boat? I thought, I have to stay alive. Tatiasha will never forgive me.

Just a breath ago, an eighteen-year-old nurse was bending over Rebecca's father's father, a wounded soldier in a Soviet hospital, saying, yes, Shura, we are going to have a baby.

We're moving cities, we're changing our name just like this hotel. You call that all right?" "Yes," she said. "We still have each other. We still have our lives." "How the definition of being all right changes," said Alexander.

Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and valor that she carried forward with Bounty and perfection in herself, the flag Alexander had followed sixteen hundred kilometers east to the Kama River, to the Ural Mountains, to Lazarevo.

How instant it was, desire. It was like a bomb exploding, fragmenting and igniting all her nerve endings.

Where your treasure is, there your hear will be also

Someday we'll meet in Lvov, my love and I.