“Harry leaned back, his hat over his inscrutable face.“Well?” Ben nudged him. “Thomas Paine, or a nubile beauty from Sicily?”“Clearly Thomas Paine. I’d be asleep now in my bed.”“Do you remember the name of the street they live on?”“Let’s see...Crazy Street? Cuckoo Street? Commitment Street? Cranial Injury Inflicted by Enraged Sibling Street?”“Canal Street! Thank you.”“I’m going to stop speaking.”“Harry, admit it, if you weren’t so utterly uninterested in all women save Alice, you would be sitting on this train yourself.”“Ben Shaw, I hate to point out the startlingly obvious, but I am sitting on this train myself.”“Exactly!”“Ugh.”“I’m surprised to learn that Lawrence is the world leader in the production of cotton and woven textiles. Are you?”“Stunned.”

“I told you,” Harry was saying to Ben. “I warned you. As soon as I saw her from distance, do you remember what I said to you?”“Yes, yes. You said she was trouble. You where wrong there, and you’re wrong now.”“Benjamin, I know about these things. She is trouble.”“You know nothing except the idiocy you glean from your insipid books that tell you nothing about life. You don’t know how to live.”“And you do?”“Yes, I do. She is no trouble. She is Life!”Harry rolled his eyes to the heavens. “More fool you. How else do you define trouble?”“Like a femme fatale,” Ben said.“Give her time, Benjamin. She is a fille fatale. Quattordici indeed!”Ben moved away from mocking Harry, his shoulders dropping.”

“I can't do it," Tatiana said "I can't walk down the streets of our life with you.""I know." They turned back to the reflections in the mirror.”

“Alexander: “First we will send the frontovik into the streets with guns. When they are dead, we will send me, with a tank, like the one you’ve been making me. When I’m dead, all the barricades down, all the weapons and tanks gone, they will send you with a rock.”Tania: “And when I’m dead?”Alexander: “You’re the last line of defense. When you’re dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?”Tania: “That’s not fair the French didn’t fight”Alexander: “The didn’t fight Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose —”

“I love you. I'm blind for you, wild for you. Sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I am telling you now. Everything that's happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through...”

“When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.”

“you know that, don't you? Alexander whispers. I love you. I'm blind for you, wild for you. I'm sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I'm telling you now. Everything that's happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through. The way I hold you, the way I touch you, my hands on you, God, me inside you, all the things I can't say during dalight, Tatiana, Tania, Tatiasha, babe, do you feel me?”