She knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse.

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.

When we realize that we are not the mind, we do not exist as a labled person. We also experience “all circus around us” does not exist either.

I don't have dating tips.

Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot.

There would be no bohemia without smoking.

As great a store Have we of books as bees of herbs or more.

Learn the fundamentals of the game and stick to them. Band-Aid remedies never last.

I was a regular dork. I was a kid who was scrawny and all that, and probably kind of dumb or something. I wasn't unordinary; I wasn't extraordinary.

It's so important to know where you are.

A wealthy and wise man doesn't shake hands with people, he gives an helping hand.

I don't do the L.A. scene. I stay focused and very myopic. I don't feel I need to prove myself or be in people's faces, especially in this town.