But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.

No one can take what's inside your head once it's there.

You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.

She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns

Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.

Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.

Sometimes the enemy walks beside you, holds your hand and kisses your pretty lips.

Teach honesty by all means - you do know what it is, don't you?

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.

I plan to be running as long as I can and have no plans to stop.

The one-time cotton picker was now the heavyweight champion of the world.

I am responsible for no one but myself.

People's vocabulary has expanded.

Hey," says Hayden, "I'm Switzerland; neutral as can be, and also with great chocolate." "Get lost," Roland tells him. "Already am." And Hayden strolls away.

An Associated Press report by Chicago-based reporter Sharon Cohen in May 1993 examined Christian fundamentalists and concluded that they were prone to 'riots, terrorism - and death.'

Everything is ended if you forgive and forget.