The Shadow Land

People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is a silent, blank page.

Then sleep reached her, a sucking undertow, and she went over backward.

In your country you don't care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.

I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of living closely with my own mind, alone with it while I practiced.

Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger. For some reason they had decided not to beat me.

there are things you have to do for yourself, even if everyone else thinks you’re crazy.

When you are not allowed to do something, it often becomes very important.

Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.

He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.

We went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to.

But when you accept an intruder for too long, you invite him back later as a guest.

I would not allow anyone into the center of myself; I would make myself a place to go, deep inside, no matter what happened.

Besides, there are things you have to do for yourself, even if everyone else thinks you’re crazy.

It was as if she could hear music, where there was no music.

when the sun rose at the quarry it turned the world lavender and gold. After

When he played that violin for us, I thought about his stories and the history he talked of, about paintings I had seen and books I had read. His violin made a smoky, mysterious sound. I heard it in the explosions of chestnuts cooking on a brazier at the edge of a river, and horses clopping across cobblestones in Siena and Florence, and also the rustle of leaves that fell on Garibaldi's troops as they marched. The violin sang 'Roma o morte,' and it wailed for the mountains of dead in an American Civil War across the sea, and for Paris glittering with the Second Empire. It rose and fell with voices reading Victor Hugo aloud by whale oil, and it sang about dynamite, about Ottomans and Englishmen falling under their horses in the Crimea, and the feet of crowds shuffling through international expositions. Above all, Stoyan's violin sang about places - places its maker had been, places the teacher of its maker had been, places its current owner would someday see, and the many, many places where he would someday perform on it.

I knew people who dreamed all the time about going somewhere else, and they let that ruin their lives. When you are not allowed to do something, it often becomes very important.

Politicians who talk about purity usually end up deciding who is pure and who is not.

It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.

have often thought that the terrible thing in communism was not just that we turned against each other. It was that we turned away from each other.

But when you accept an intruder for too long, you sometimes invite him back later as a guest.

But sometimes a man who is very good thinks, I am very bad, and it—destructs his life, everything. Because he does not believe that he has any right to do something, so he does less and less.

He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight.

They were taking my natural feelings away, so quietly that it could have occurred without my noticing. I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next.