City of thieves Quotes

“It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.”

“Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”

“The front door is usually unlocked and there is no alarm system. They don't wear their seat belts in the car; they don't wear suntan lotion in the sun. They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don't even believe in him.”

“‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.”

“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.”

“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”

“He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.”

“She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.”

“Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny.”

“Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?”