“His suit smelled of cigarettes and Breznev”

“Those days when our watch sees to take lazy age over each minute, and there is always so much time left, so little passed, since the last time you looked. And then at the end, when you're suddenly nervous and want to back out, the time goes in a rush and it's now.”

“That's what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn't about Russia. It never is, I don't think, when a relationship ends. It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.”

“From above you could see the chaos of entangled plots on the other side of the road, and a couple of tough tethered goats, and the glint of a frozen pond somewhere in the trees. Above them the sun was shining vaguely through the milky November sky, old but strong. In April – between the thaw and the jungly green explosion of summer – or in raw mid-October, I bet the same view would have been barren and depressing. But when we stood there all the bits of old tractors and discarded refrigerators, the shoals of empty vodka bottles and dead animals that tend to litter the Russian countryside were invisible, smothered by the annual oblivion of the snow. The snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience.”

“...the thirty-something zone of disappointment, the time when momentum and ambition start to fade and friends parents start to die.”

“could tell that one of the Russian proverbs he loved was on the way. ‘The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap”

“I write better with alcohol.”