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1 " The front door is usually unlocked and there is no alarm system. They don't wear their seat belts in the car; they don't wear suntan lotion in the sun. They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don't even believe in him. "
― David Benioff , City of Thieves
2 " I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others. "
3 " That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war. "
4 " Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal? "
5 " Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor. "
6 " She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments. "
7 " I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. "
8 " It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. "
9 " Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin. "
10 " Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.” I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him. "
11 " Every woman has a dream lover and anightmare lover. The nightmare lover, he just lies on top of her, crushing her with his belly, jabbing his little tool in and out till he's finished. He got his eyes clenched shut, he doesn't say a word; essentially he's just jerking off in the poor girl's pussy. (Kolya Vlasov) "
12 " You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. "
13 " This wasn't the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn't. "
14 " it smelled like jail...sore knees and loose assholes. "
15 " In the silence of her nonanswer, I considered the possibility that I was a very boring person. Who else but a boring person would utter such meaningless trifles? If a brilliant pig, the prodigy of the barnyard, spent his entire life learning Russian, and on finally becoming proficient the first words he heard were my own, he would wonder why he had wasted his best years when he could have been lolling in the mud, eating slop with the other dumb beasts. "
16 " Your mother's cunt has a peculiar tubular shape!' he yelled. 'Nonetheless, I tolerate its effluvium and enthusiastically lick its inner folds whenever she demands! "
17 " [Lev Beniov:] "The imminence of death did not frighten me as much as it should have. I had been too afraid for too long; I was too exhausted, too hungry, too feel anything with proper intensity. But if my fear had diminished, it was not because my courage had increased. My body was so weak, so spent, that my legs trembled from the effort of standing upright. I could summon no great concern for anything, including the fate of Lev Beniov. "
18 " I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboard of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that's the way I'll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the hear, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good whack to put me down for the night. But that night I didn't have a chance. I stared into the blackness until the blackness blurred into gray, until the ceiling above me began to take form and the light from the east dribbled in through the narrow barred window. "
19 " The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening. "
20 " A young woman stood in the hallway, a suitcase at her feet, a cardboard carton in her hands. She wore a yellow cotton dress with a white flower print. The silver dragonfly on her necklace hung in the hollow of her collarbone and her thick red hair cascaded past her sunburned shoulders. She will tell you that she hadn't chosen that dress with any care, or the necklace, that she hadn't washed her hair or scrubbed her face, put a little red on her lips. Don't believe it. No one looks that good by accident. "
