“He was Lenin in a Lamborghini. He was Gandhi with a gun”

“You can't hold on to things just because of the memories. Otherwise, no one would ever move house. Or country. Or chuck a crap boyfriend. Every crap boyfriend has at least one good memory attached to him. But you have to let them go. Otherwise, you're all, 'Oh, but there was that lovely time we walked in the autumn leaves.”

“No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.”

“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

“I realize that I only have words and that, from time to time, as I hold them in my arms I am less lonely.”

“So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin.”

“Is it weird to pray during sex? Maybe it is, but sometimes it happens. I’ve tried to accept that it’s who I am—a man who loves God, and who loves fucking, that I can be dirty and holy all in the same moment.”

“The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable”