“Was it only that explosion of atavism which is now evasively called "the cult of personality" that was so horrible? Or was it even more horrible that during those same years, in 1937 itself, we celebrated Pushkin's centennial? And that we shamelessly continued to stage those self-same Chekhov plays, even though the answers to them had already come in? Is it not still more dreadful that we are now being told, thirty years later, "Don't talk about it!"? If we start to recall the sufferings of millions, we are told it will distort the historical perspective! If we doggedly seek out the essence of our morality, we are told it will darken our material progress! Let's think rather about the blast furnaces, the rolling mills that were built, the canals that were dug... no, better not talk about the canals.... Then maybe about the gold of the Kolyma? No, maybe we ought not to talk about that either.... Well, we can talk about anything, so long as we do it adroitly, so long as we glorify it....”

“There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?""In physics," I said."Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it.""On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!”

“We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.”

“We were only granted 30 minutes every Thursday. Today may be the last day...and so we continued to talk, even about trivial little things, and even if our throats became sore...”

“By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.”

“The more we talk about our troubles and fears, the more life we breathe into them.”