“It was a fire of conscience, and meanings that made up packages of hell which seared into the mind. And what could we do? Supply a variety of survival strategies that made sense of the cacophony of survival?”

“War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.”

“We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.” “We can't control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”

“(On surviving on the raft for 47 days) We had truly made it on a wing and prayer.”

“Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again ... we are survivors. If you are here today... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bare a different name: warriors.”

“I decided that my initial survival strategy would involve declaring my complete ignorance of what was going on. This would not,naturally, be terribly hard to do.”