19 Quotes by Olga Grushin

... but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.

Hers was a small and lonely life, a rigorous servitude in preparation for a bigger life, as she tried to see it; yet now, just beneath the thinning fabric of her existence, she sensed an invisible roiling of vast, terrifying, dangerous things—things that would play with you if you pleased them, things that would kill you if you proved a disappointment.

I suspect I do not like kisses in general--perhaps my blood is stirred by poetry alone--but I have no grounds for comparison.

... this stray little thought released in him some echo of the past, a solitary trembling note whose sound rose higher and higher in his chest, awakening inarticulate longings and, inseparable from them, a piercing, unfamiliar sorrow.

For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy? Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one's imagination? And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?

Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life.

The night embraces me, cool and endless, and above me the stars are tiny holes in the darkness through which the light of eternity is pouring out. I can almost sense primordial stardust flowing through my veins. People are forever telling me that stars make them feel small, and I always nod noncommittally and wonder at the stuffy confinement of their minds. Stars make me feel vast.

Just a corner, just an instant, just a poem away lay an unimaginably rich world where gods walked alongside the chosen few; and if you ever won your way there, your reward was meaning conferred upon your daily labors and travails by the promise of immortality, by the clarity of secret luminescence.

My dream house . . . Each room a different texture, a different mood, a different poem, and at its heart, a creaking ladder sliding along floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in a timeless oak-paneled room that smells of leather and eternity.