... hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.

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.

A few songs with Him might change the way you sing. Forever.

Relationships are like gardening. If you don't water the plants, they die.

A stupid is one who thinks that those in power today had clandestine means of getting there, yet wants to get there without thinking of the clandestine route they would be taking.

Appreciate what you have while you still have it because one day you won't.

When I first moved to New York, I moved all over because I never knew where I would be or if I was going to Europe, so I would sublet apartments. It was miserable because I was constantly moving.

When you graduate from college, they tell you to follow your dreams. Does anyone say you have to wake up first?

I've only been doing this fifty-four years. With a little experience, I might get better.

I go to church every Sunday. I've always been a believer. I love singing. I don't have the best voice - I just love getting my emotions out.

You can live your life out of a circumstance or you can live your life out of a vision.

I mean, I'm not going to play the hero of something.