" I had sat at table with an old, semiliterate man in a dirty jacket and canvas boots and felt in my heart an excitement I had seldom known. By then Armenia and Russia no longer seemed to matter. I was no longer thinking about the nature of greatness or the characteristics of a particular nation. There was only the human soul, the soul that did not lose faith as it suffered anguish and torment among the scree and vineyards of Palestine, the soul that remains equally human and good in a little village near Penza, under the sky of India, and in a northern yurt—because there is good in people everywhere, simply because they are human beings. "

― Vasily Grossman , An Armenian Sketchbook