“On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!”

“When all is said and done, later in this century, and in the next one, and the century after that, it will be understood that. . .the greatest American writer of our time was James M. Cain.”

“When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.”

“Fridays! They are the worst. Days stuffed with itsy-bitsy multicoloured tasks that fill every second of the day, but like M&M´s fail to nourish in any way.”

“Bear!” hecried into my ear. “What‟s going to happen to me? Oh, Bear, I‟m just a littleguy! I‟m not big like you! What‟s going to happen to me?”

“The only time I got into trouble was when I forged M's signature on the weekly report we had to take home every Friday and take back to school again signed by one of our parents. The reason I did so was that M happened to be out at the time and I thought I could save myself trouble.”