“Shall I tell you a joke about languages? Abulfaz asked.A joke. Yes, okay.What do you call a Russian who speaks four languages?I don't know.A Zionist. What about a Russian who speaks three languages?I don't know.A spy. And two? ... No? A nationalist. And only one? ... An inter-nationalist.”

“They call it 'the whispering of the stars.' Listen," he said, raising a finger for silence. I could still hear the tinkling and craned my neck to see what it was. Zhensky laughed. "No, here. Look." He formed his mouth into a wide O and exhaled slowly. As he did, I saw the cloud of breath fall in droplets to the ground. That was the sound I heard: our breath falling. "It's a Yakut expression. It means a period of weather so cold that your breath falls frozen to the ground before it can dissipate. The Yakuts say that you should never tell secrets outside during the whispering of the stars, because the words themselves freeze, and in the spring thaw anyone who walks past that spot will be able to hear them.”

“I felt I would live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed (did I mention that I never bothered filling out any grad-school applications?) It’s self-indulgent, I know, but this is what happens to the overachieving but essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well on tests but failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition.”

“I speak the language of love. That’s right, I speak Russian.”

“You came so that you could learn about your dreams," said the old woman. "And dreams are the language of God. When he speaks in our language, I can interpret what he has said. But if he speaks in the language of the soul, it is only you who can understand.”

“There's an old Russian saying that goes some way or another. I don't know it. I don't speak Russian. But sometimes I think about it and wonder if it's relevant to what I'm going through at the time. Probably not. I mean what do Russian know about hunger, anyway?”

“Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.”