“We all flee in hope of finding some ground of security”

“There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.”

“The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion . . . Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them . . . In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books.”

“When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the one who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator.Vsevolod Meyerhold came as close as anyone to achieving this. It is important to know of the full horror of his sacrifice. It is easy for all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.- Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”

“When asked, 'What did you want to say in this work?' he would answer, 'I've said what I've said.'This made sense in where everyone assumed music had a meaning - but where saying the wrong thing could get a person killed.-Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”

“It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.”

“Hope, belief, and despair are not simply moods. They change our physical performance. They alter how quickly we react, how hard we fight, how quick we are to give up.- Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”

“We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”

“I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.”

“People talk about the beauty of the spring, but I can't see it. The trees are brown and bare, slimy with rain. Some are crawling with new purple hairs. And the buds are bulging like tumorous acne, and I can tell that something wet, and soft, and cold, and misshapen is about to be born. And I am turning into a vampire.”

“I'm electric with vertigo, even though I'm on the ground, vertigo like I felt once when I stood on the edge of a high cliff in Arizona and looked straight down.”