01UndatedAsk yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: What do believe in? What do you hope for? What do you love?Paullina Simons / quote ↗
03UndatedTatiana said. "Go on with Dasha. She is right for you. She is a woman and I'm-" "Blind!", Alexander exclaimed. Tatiana stood, desolately failing in the battle of her heart. "Oh, Alexander. What do you want from me..." "Everything", he whispered fiercely.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
04UndatedAlexander tilted his head and kissed her deeply on the lips. He let go of her hands, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. They kissed as if in a fever... they kissed as if the breath were leaving their bodies.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
05UndatedI'm not hungry," Alexander whispered. "I'm famished. Watch out for me. Now, don't make a single sound," he said, moving on top of her. "Tania, God....I'll cover your mouth, just like this, and you hold on to me, just like this, and I'm going to-just like this-Paullina Simons / quote ↗
06UndatedWhen I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.""Looks like you're still there, Shura.""No," he said. "I'm in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
07UndatedDo you remember what you're supposed to do now? Kiss the palm of your hand and press it against your heart.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
08UndatedLupe would have a lot to say about this. I can almost hear her gravelly voice in my head. There is no hate without fear, she'd say. Hate is fear crystallized, fear objectified. We hate what threatens our selves, our dreams, our plans, our freedom, our place in the world, our place in the hearts of the people we love. We fear first. Then we hate.And I know what I would say to her in response. Lupe, I'd say. My troubles are just beginning.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
09UndatedI’m getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It’s six and you’re not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you’re tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you’re running after him. You’re wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory.I love you, babe.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
10UndatedTatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?"Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
11UndatedOh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
12UndatedThey stared at each other. Every ocean, every river, every minute they had walked together was in their gaze. He said nothing and she said nothing. She kneeled by him, her hands on him, on his chest, on his heart, on his lungs that took air in but could not move air out, on his open wound; her eyes were on him, and in their eyes was every block of uncounted, unaccounted-for time, every moment they had lived since June 22, 1941, the day war started for the Soviet Union. Her eyes were filled with everything she felt for him. Her eyes were true.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
13UndatedThis is days and days and months and years and all the minutes in between, just you me.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
14UndatedTatiana hugged him and said, “And here’s mine: ‘Honey, what do you prefer—my beautiful body or my beautiful face?’” “Your sense of humor,” returned Alexander, holding her to him until she couldn’t breathe.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
15UndatedThere were other things,too, to ask him. Always she tries to be less forward. Always she tried to find the right thing to say and didn't trust the etiquette pendulum swinging in her head, so she simply said nothing, which was perceived either as painful shyness of haughtiness. Dasha never had that problem. She just said the first thing that came into her head. Tatiana knew she needed to rust her inner voice more. It was certainly loud enoughPaullina Simons / quote ↗
16UndatedAll great things worth having require great sacrifice worth giving.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
17UndatedMarx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn't talking about capitalism?Paullina Simons / quote ↗
18UndatedShe ate it and cried.Soon, he put the melting ice cream away."Shura," Tatiana whispered, "darling, forget what should have been. Remember all that was.""Tatiasha, babe," Alexander whispered, coming back to bed to be covered, "my one and only wife, forget our age, our splendid youth, forget it all and let our crazy love make us young.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
19UndatedAlexander moved her off him, laid her down, was over her, was pressed into her, crushing her. Anthony was right there, he didn't care, he was trying to inhale her, trying to absorb her into himself. "All this time you were stepping out in front of me, Tatiana," he said. "Now I finally understand. You hid me on Bethel Island for eight months. For two years you hid me and deceived me - to save me. I am such an idiot," he whispered. "Wretch or not, ravaged or not, in a carapace or not, there you still were, stepping out for me, showing the mute mangled stranger your brave and indifferent face."Her eyes closed, her arms tightened around his neck. "That stranger is my life," she whispered. They crawled away from Anthony, from their only bed, onto a blanket on the floor, barricading themselves behind the table and chairs. "You left our boy to go find me, and this is what you found..." Alexander whispered, on top of her, pushing inside her, searching for peace.Crying out underneath him, Tatiana clutched his shoulders."This is what you brought back from Sachsenhausen." his movement was tense, deep, needful. Oh God. Now there was comfort. "You thought you were bringing back him, but Tania, you brought back me.""Shura...you'll have to do..." Her fingers were clamped into his scars."In you," said Alexander, lowering his lips to her parted mouth and cleaving their flesh, "are the answers to all things."All the rivers flowed into the sea and still the sea was not full.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
20UndatedWar was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.Paullina Simons / quote ↗
21UndatedThough outwardly Kristina maintained that a clean room was a symptom of a diseased mind (for how could she, while studying the world's greatest thinkers, be bothered with such mundane earthly issues as cleaning?), inwardly she hated untidyness and made a point of spending as little time in the room as possible.Paullina Simons / quote ↗