1
" Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life. "
― Olga Grushin , The Line
5
" Perhaps, she thought, in some parallel dimension, infinitely close and infinitely far away, another house existed alongside theirs, and in that other house lived fascinating people who did fascinating things and held fascinating talks over their dinner table—and though there was no doorway between the two places, one could occasionally stumble upon glimpses and echos of that other, brighter place, and for one single moment of miraculous serendipity, one could feel almost complete. "
― Olga Grushin , Forty Rooms
10
" In anyone's life there can be only a few such moments - moments when a long, ringing hush fills your hearing, the world stands still as if under a magic spell, and thoughts and feelings course freely through your being, traversing the whole of eternity in the duration of a minute, so that when time resumes and you return from whatever nameless, dazzling void you briefly inhabited, you find yourself changed, changed irrevocably, and from then on, whether you want it or not, your life flows in a different direction. This was such a moment for me. "
― Olga Grushin , The Dream Life of Sukhanov
16
" Of all the different kinds of art, you see, poetry is the one most attuned to man's condition, and therefore the most noble and the most demanding of them all. Just as men struggle to transcend the inherent limits of geography, history, and biology to find the meaning of life, so poets strive to transcend the inherent limits of language, meter, and structure to find beauty and truth. And just as life wouldn't have meaning without death, so poetry wouldn't have its sublime power outside the prison of its form. "
― Olga Grushin , Forty Rooms
20
" As he strode through the deserted city, he thought of the New Years of his childhood, before he was ten, before the Change, when the city had still glowed with the soft, deep enchantment of sugared angels spreading their sparkling wings in bakery windows, and bells whose limpid sounds rose like the sea at a moonlit tide, and glass ornaments turning slowly this way and that on dark tree branches, gathering in their reflections the whole wondrous, promise-filled world. "
― Olga Grushin , The Line