We’ve had a minute, Tatiana thought. We had our minutes on the bus. And at Kirov. We had our minutes in Lugo. And in the Summer Garden. Breathless minutes, we had. What we want, she thought, keeping herself from welling up, is eternity.
Tatiana and the soldier were having a silence.
Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are – Unyielding.
Tatia: I think its too big to fit.
I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled.
Whenever you’re unsure of yourself, whenever you’re in doubt, ask yourself three questions. What do you believe in? What do you hope for? but most important, ask yourself, what do you love?
Alexander to Tatiana: I love you as much as it is possible for a man to love a woman.
Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him. Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.
If I can live through this, he thought, I can live through anything. If I can live through this, I WILL live through anything.
And that’s my point: all great things worth having require great sacrifice worth giving.
When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.
Everything comes at a price. Everything in your life. The question you have to ask yourself is, what price are you willing to pay?
War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.
When I was growing up, ‘Anna Karenina’ was one of my favourite books.
I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.
I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn’t born into it.
Falling in love with you in the Summer Garden in the white nights in Leningrad is the moment that propels me through life.
And then, because she was Tatiana and because she couldn’t help herself, and because he wouldn’t have it any other way, she ran to him and was in his arms.
Shura, I’m yours. You may not like it today, you may not want it tonight, you may wish for it all to be different now, but it remains, and I remain, as always, only yours. Nothing can change that. Not your wrath, your fists, your body or your death.
You are my hand grenade, my artillery fire. You have replaced my heart with yourself.