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

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.

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.

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

We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?

Love your friends as if they would some day hate you.

Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.

2010 has been awesome. I got to write on the David Hasselhoff Roast this summer, and that's always been a dream.

You have summoned me in my weakness. You must sustain me in your strength.

Let's learn to live, for we must die alone.

With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.

If you can defend, counter-attack and take the initiative then you become a more dangerous player.

All we can do is go about our work. But we can have a goal. We can have a dream.