Strands of (other people's) thoughts

The writing is both charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular vision.

She speaks as if the entire acreage of her skin were a listening device.

Vanishing is a way of life, of coping with the unbearable, of transmuting identity into something more manageable, if anonymous existence. Identity, like so much unwanted history, is a burden to be shed.
Relieved to be excused from love and marriage and all the preliminary and subsequent complications and mortifications that involved.

Fog banks of neuroses, in which even the most inconsequential gesture settles, like a heavy woolen blanket, over an aching heart.

Literature in Russia is not as neutral a commodity as it is in the West.

Josef Stalin was like a Genghis Khan with a telephone; he made midnight phone calls (to end lives).