“We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”

“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.”

“We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.”

“By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was.”

“All believers in Christ, the Scripture teaches, will suffer-all of us. You will be glorified, Paul says, if you suffer with him. The problem with too many of us is not that we don't suffer, but that we assume that only Third World Christians or heroic missionaries are suffering. My boys didn't know that they were suffering in Russia; they would feel it as suffering now.”

“I couldn’t help but feel as if everyone had lied about everything. We all had secrets. We all had a dark side to our innocent cover. I wondered what we would be like, if we had been completely honest with each other in the first place. Maybe more people would be alive, but then again, more people could be dead.”