“I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?”

“Oh, Marya Morevna! Do you know how the church-folk call me, me and my daughter Gamayun, when they paint us on their ceilings? They call us archangels, and say that we live in heaven, where no vine of sorrow or memory grows. That is where I sent you, not to heaven—tscha! I know nothing of that place. But to a place like the ceiling of a church.”

“I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.”

“Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.”

“If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.”

“That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.”

“I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see.”