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

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.

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

Don’t just be who you are and what you are. Move, evolve, change, grow and become better each day.

Whatever you do, don’t make it worse by trying to come up with some flimsy excuse for why you were in the ventilation shaft, Lina told herself.

Some memories just stay. They just refuse to give up on staying. Maybe it is good that they stay. It helps us stay rooted. It helps us to know who we really are.

Sometimes people don't want to look back because they are afraid of facing the truth. But sometimes, facing the truth we're afraid of is what makes us who we're really supposed to be.

I do like to sing to God!

It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies.

Old I may be, but, given the chance, I will learn.

I don't drink anymore, on the other hand I don't drink any less either.

When death becomes the property of the believer it receives a new name and is called sleep.