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1 " After the funeral, they went to a private club in Chelsea, where they drank and jammed the night away together—greats and nobodies alike. The slightly acrimonious, sardonic Mickey, a fan of folk and world music, would have been pleased. [...] Yurik played, too, his own composition, which he had been working on for the entire year. In memory of Mickey.For it was Mickey, who had lived so easily, so lightly, and had died so painfully, who had instilled in Yurik the consciousness that, in the highest sense, music had no authorship. It was a gift, and an ability to read the divine book, to transpose a universal sound that needed no notation into the language of paltry musical instruments, invented for the convenience and purpose of transmitting supremely important messages—messages that could not be conveyed in any other way ... And the best ears, the best hearts and souls of this spiritual dimension called music, listened to Yurik's song that evening. And heard it. "
― Lyudmila Ulitskaya , Лестница Якова
2 " Yurik's room became their love nest. And a messier room the world had never seen. It was a jumble of dirty socks strewn about the floor, sheet music, CDs, cigarette butts, paper plates, and half-filled cans of Coke. An old Hammond organ, left behind by former tenants, stood in the hallway, blocking half the entrance and leaving only a narrow space to squeeze through.This was the room where the young couple broadened their knowledge of the world, from time to time ingesting substances that took them to other places and realities. But when Laura finished high school, and showed her parents the report card with grades that would never get her admitted into a decent college, she announced to Yurik that he had no prospects, and danced off forever. After leaving Yurik and giving him his first broken heart, she went to California. Then she flew off to the places where fearless and brainless enthusiasts of dangerous journeys fly to. "
3 " When she was still a child, her daughter had asked Marina, ‘Why do Russians have such bad teeth and greasy hair?’Marina could have answered this question, but she chose to remain silent; there would have been too much to explain, about how every culture had its own habits: Americans change their T-shirts twice a day and wash every time they come near a shower. But a Russian, from one generation to the next, washed once a week in the bathhouse, on Saturdays, and changed his underwear at the same time. Many of them lived in communal housing, where there was no bathroom at all. And she would also have had to talk about how every shabbily dressed Russian child at their age read as many books in a year as she and her brother were likely to read in a lifetime. And how every decent Russian adult knew as many poems by heart as a professor of philology in this country had ever known. "
4 " Amalia could hardly keep from crying as she threw out the butts from the ashtray: 'Nora, even drinking is better than smoking. It goes without saying that it's bad for you, but the smell is also disgusting! Chekhov said that kissing a woman who smokes is like licking an ashtray!' Nora dismissed her with a wave of the hand and said, laughing, 'Mama, Chekhov and I will never have to kiss anyway. "
5 " The next day, she flew back to Moscow. If anyone loved long-distance flights, it was Nora. She loved it when you found yourself nowhere at all—in a sort of abstract space and an indeterminate, vacillating time, when, all of a sudden, all obligations, all promises cease. Everything is put on hold—telephone calls, the mail, requests, offers, complaints—they all stop short, and you hover, you fly, you soar between heaven and earth, between earth and the moon, between the earth and the sun. You fall out of your ordinary system of coordinates. You fly … as Tengiz, my soulmate, had; the only one I knew who had burst through all the boundaries of this world alive, and had learned to inhabit another world—the world of shadows … Tengiz … Love beyond touch, love outside of time. "
6 " Why did this music move her? Was it really a signal of some kind? They had all been so musical-both her grandfathers, Alexander and Jacob—and Genrikh … Genrikh … And from her heart a deep lament rose up and choked her, and it was as though it wasn't she crying, but Genrikh in her. Little Genrikh, intolerable little child who threw himself on the floor and thrashed his arms and legs, who wanted to fly a glider or an plane, whom they barred from his beloved profession of aviation—yes, of course, because his father, was an enemy of the people and ruined everything. He was robbed of his dreams, his hopes, his shining, beckoning future. Oh, poor Genrikh!Nora cried together with him, this boy, her future and former father, who had not been given the chance to live the life he dreamed about. He sobbedand gasped for then grew tired and moaned quietly, then howled again, and started throwing a tantrum. Nora just wiped away the tears. How awful! Would his grief never end? Would it never burn out, never die? Would it torment him, and Nora, and the newborn who had only just arrived and was not guilty of anything at all? Is it possible that the evil we commit never dissipates, but hangs above the head of every new child that emerges out of this river of time? "
7 " ...Милая моя жена! Ошибка в Библии - не из ребра Адама сотворена была Ева, а из сердца вырезана. Я физически чуствую это место в сердце. "
8 " Писателя формируют либо жизнь + книги, либо только книги, но никогда только жизнь без книг. "
9 " And the meaning of love, its power and happiness, consists in the fact that, in loving one person, you are liberated from others, from attraction and longing for them. "
10 " But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death.Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. It is the immortal essence, written in code, that organized the mortal bodies of Pythagoras and Aristotle, Parmenides and Plato, as well as the random person one encounters on the road, in the streetcar, on the metro, or in the seat next to you in an airplane. Who suddenly appears before you, and calls up a familiar, dim sensation of a previously glimpsed outline, a bend or a curve, a likeness—perhaps of a great-grandfather, a fellow villager, or even someone from the other side of the world. Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge.One hundred thousand essences, united in a certain pattern and order, form a human being, a temporary abode for each and every person. This is, in fact, immortality. And you, a human being—a white man, a black woman, an idiot, a genius, a Nigerian pirate, a Parisian baker, a transvestite from Rio de Janeiro, an old rabbi from Bnei Brak—you, too, are just a temporary abode. "
11 " She discovered that her perception of the world had become doubled, as though it had acquired a stereoscopic property. A pleasant puff of wind blowing through the window became both frightening and alarming, because Yurik turned over in his crib from the stream of air on his cheeks. The tap of a hammer in the apartment above, which she wouldn't even have noticed before, was painful to her ears, and she responded to these blows from the depths of her body, just like the baby. ... She hoped that when she stopped breast-feeding him her familiar world would re-establish itself. But this never happened. On the contrary, it was as though, together with the baby, she was learning to know what was soft, hard, hot, or sharp; she looked at the branch of a tree, a toy, any object at all, with primordial curiosity. Just like him, she ripped pages of newsprint and listened to the rustling of the paper; she licked his toys, noting that the plastic duck was more pleasing to the tongue than the rubber kitten. Once, after she had fed Yurik, she was wiping the sticky cream of wheat off the table with her hand and she caught herself thinking that there was indeed something pleasurable about smearing it on the surface. Yurik was thrilled when he saw his mother doing what he liked to do, and started slapping his little palm in the mess of porridge. Both of them were rubbing their hands around on the tabletop. Both of them were happy. "
