Elena Gorokhova Quotes

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.

A bunch of silly men chasing a ball" my mother says "give each one his own ball if they're so desperate to have one

Look beyond that light,' says my father. 'Look hard and you'll see people filing into the theater. You'll see ushers run up and down the aisles; people talk, programs rustle-you'll hear a murmur. When the lights start to dim, the murmur rises, and then, just a moment before the curtain goes up, the noise stops-everyone in the house holds their breath, everyone knows what is going to happen. This is the moment I've always loved most:the anticipation of magic, the expectation of illusion.

What's inside you no one can touch.

Don't let the magic slip away," he says, "or you'll sink into the quicksand of the ordinary.

Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land. We are unmoored and disconnected, like these poplar seeds blown into the crevices of the buildings, into the corners of the world.

I often think about how we itch to run away from home and then keep searching for it for the rest of our lives.

I still know this place and its people to the marrow of their bones, to their soft, unguarded core, which had once sustained my own life, yet I am as much of an outsider here as I am on the other side of the world, in my adopted country. The truth is that there is no bridge between the two lives - the past and the present - that would conveniently span the memory of loss and the promise of an onward search. There is only a wound, the inner divide of exile. A daughter of an anatomy professor, I should have known that sliced hearts do not become whole, that split souls do not mend. Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land.

and he wants to see those courtyard wells that depress the spirit and twist the soul into a truly Russian miserable knot.

Her mother, like my own, was simply a mother, defined only by her family rather than an outside job she never held.

In the darkness, with their fingers on the buttons of each other’s coats, desire bumps against resentment, challenging it to a brief duel where desire promptly fires a fatal shot straight into resentment’s heart.

In this life It’s not difficult to die. To make life Is more difficult by far.

I thought of those in the stratosphere of the Kremlin, dressed in generals’ uniforms and party suits, puffing on pipes at their desks, debating the fate of our lives between sips of cognac, issuing search warrants, signing decrees of death.

Let’s part tonight and end this madness.

All will be well,” she’ll say, healing her with the warmth of her embrace, and this time, despite her stubbornness and doubt, Sasha will believe her.

She will hold this secret on the back shelf of her heart, and no one will suspect anything, not even Grandma, who must have felt the hot touch of Theater when her retrograde father prohibited her from singing opera in Moscow. Sasha will pretend she wants to be an engineer, like Grandpa, or a doctor, like her mother, so no one will suspect anything until she finishes tenth grade and then leaves for Moscow to study acting.

This is the unbound time, the disconnected time, time that has lost its meaning, time where no time exists.

Isn’t it ironic,” says Andrei, “that the executioner becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the executioner? Our system, if you think of it, is pure genius: executioners and victims are the same people. The engine of death has been in motion for decades, and no one is guilty, because everyone is guilty.

But there is one thing my father-in-law told me about choices that has always stayed with me: you either pull the trigger, or you kneel on the floor.

You were born in the wrong country, Sashenka. You’re naive and uncompromising. You don’t bend, and sooner or later, our motherland will break you. It breaks everyone.

If I believed in God, like Raphael or Michelangelo, I would have cursed God. In the absence of God, I cursed my motherland. It was

success is never forgiven,

She gets up, pulls on a sweater and pants she wore the day before, and walks downstairs to the bus stop, almost sleepwalking, as if she’d been enmeshed in cobwebs, so every step requires effort to push through the sticky binding.

We all live surrounded by three rows of fences, in a courtyard with a stump behind which you get fucked,” she says. “Just like the characters in this play you’re closing.” They both know that the scene from Ostrovsky is a metaphor not only for life in their motherland but also for the dead end of their own nonlife together.

no, she’s not happy without him and yes, she is happy when she is onstage. She is happy to be breathing in the damp smell of wool from his coat. She is unhappy that they can’t go to her apartment, tear off their clothes, as they did three years ago, and ravage each other until they both melt and start coursing through each other’s veins like lifeblood.

Acting is freedom. It’s searching for what’s real,” she says. “Every performance is different. Together with the other actors onstage and with the audience, I search for the truth—we all do—and sometimes we almost find it. That’s the essence of acting: looking for the truth. There is nothing fake about it. There is no pretending.

My love is an arduous weight, hanging on you wherever you flee.

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.

all of those with weak nerves, those whose minds are clouded by seeing too many human guts wound around tank turrets, too many bodies with heads blown off, a bloody mess instead of legs, too much death.

Don’t let the magic slip away,” he says, “or you’ll sink into the quicksand of the ordinary.

You have to learn to play the hand you've been dealt," Andy reminds me in his therapist voice. "Stop wishing for another hand.

help

If I believed in God, like Raphael or Michelangelo, I would have cursed God. In the absence of God, I cursed my motherland. It was supposed to nurture and protect us, the people it had inspired to its revolutionary ideals of a meager life and hard work, and while we had been busy keeping our end of the bargain, our motherland, like a courtyard thug, had turned around, pulled out a switchblade, and stuck it under our ribs. I

, signing decrees of death. Sitting like judges at their engineered trials, pounding gavels with their meaty hands: death, death, death. What made their hearts beat, what pushed through their veins instead of blood was the sludge of paranoia and betrayal. Who is not with us is against us, their eyes instruct us from the portraits hanging in every office. We do not arrest good people, they say. We’re simply protecting our motherland from its enemies with the help of other good people, all those neighbors with properly attuned ears, insufficient living space, and healthy socialist envy.

Vsyo budet khorosho,

Even with all the windows open, the room smells of stale beer and soot, and the air is permeated with the acrid melancholy of leaving mixed with the pungent anticipation of travel.

what if life is indeed all utilitarian and tethered to the ground, like the spindly goat of one of their neighbors, circling the pole, day after day, over the dusty grass of the yard?

There is no doubt in her mind that Kolya knew about the life of make-believe, the life of art.

names absent from their literature textbooks and even from the catalog of the entire Ivanovo library. It is, she knows, because those poets wrote about unsocialist things, devoting every line to feelings rather than the workers’ accomplishments, which was clearly selfish and individualistic from the point of view of their new progressive communist collective.

She chooses wine. It is red and sweet, the wine from Georgia called Khvanchkara, the favorite wine of Stalin, the toastmaster proclaims. Sasha has her doubts about this claim, for whoever knew what Stalin favored has probably been dead for at least a decade, arrested and shot for knowing too much,

She hoped Lara would find the strength to rip the memory out of her mind and fling it to the mental garbage pile where it belonged.

with fresh arms and legs and newly shaved heads mobilized from republic capitals and small villages, from factory towns and collective farms, dressed in new uniforms and thrown into the foul cauldron of new battles.

Cut yourself free of what you love and hope that the wound heals. —J.