You shouldn't rush, he said. There are no taste buds in your stomach.

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.

I die the king's faithful servant, but God's first.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

Work well done is not only a responsibility to yourselves and society; it is also an emotional need.

The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure.

Develop an Interest in Life as you see it.

Really good things take time to grow. Foundation is not built over night.

I'm Larry David. I happen to enjoy wearing women's panties.

Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.

I am what I wanted and I want what I am.