Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
Never trust anyone under one hundred!
I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.
The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.
September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.
Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.
But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.
That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.
I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?
Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.
And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.
I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.
What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?
When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.
Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.
It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.
Things that are unsightly: birthmarks, infidelity, strangers in one’s kitchen. Too much sunlight. Stitches. Missing teeth. Overlong guests.