Paullina Simons
I love you breathlessly, my amazing man.Collection: Love You
Dear God, Tatiana prayed in bed that night, turning to the wall and pulling the white sheet and the thin brown blanket over herself. If You are there somewhere, please teach me how to hide what I never knew how to show.Collection: Wall
You are my hand grenade, my artillery fire. You have replaced my heart with yourself.Collection: Heart
This is days and days and months and years and all the minutes in between, just you me.Collection: Years
We walk alone through this world, but if we're lucky, we have a moment of belonging to something, to someone, that sustains us through a lifetime of loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
Memory - that fiend, that cruel enemy of comfort.Collection: Memories
Not bombs nor my broken heart can take away from me walking barefoot with you in jasmine June through the Field of Mars.Collection: Heart
Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.Collection: Sorrow
I love you. I'm blind for you, wild for you. Sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I am telling you now. Everything that's happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through.Collection: Love You
Tania, there is so much still ahead of you. Be patient with lifeCollection: Patient
Here, take this, she would say, take this, and tell me where he is. Tell me whether he's dead or alive, so I can walk as his widow or his wife. No one would, or could, tell her, and so she continued to cook, and to learn new things all the while searching for an answer among the outcasts. The way he carried his body, the way he walked in my life, Tatiana thought, declared that he was the only man I had ever loved, and he knew it. And until I was alone without him, I thought it was all worth it.Collection: Men
There are some battles, no matter how much you don’t want to fight them, that you just have to fight. That are worth giving your life for.Collection: Fighting
You have amazing gifts. Don't squander them. Don't give them out meaninglessly, don't abuse them, don't take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die. -Tatiana and AlexanderCollection: Giving
I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep goingCollection: Too Much
Love is when he is hungry and you feed him. Love is knowing when he is hungry.Collection: Love Is
The power you have over someone who loves you is greater than any other power you'll ever have.Collection: Love You
Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.Collection: Wall
Lazarevo drips you into my soul, dawn drop by moonlight drop from the river Kama. When you look for me, look for me there, because that's where I'll be all the days of my life.Collection: Rivers
I have a certain sensibility that I bring to my writing that comes from knowing two things: what I as a reader like to read, and what as a writer I am capable of. I know my own limits. I know there are things I cannot do.Collection: Writing
And then, because she was Tatiana and because she couldn’t help herself, and because he wouldn’t have it any other way, she ran to him and was in his arms.Collection: Arms
....and when Tatiana lifted her glistening eyes to him, Alexander was looking down at her with his I’ll-get-on-the-bus-for-you-anytime face.Collection: Eye
A bus came. The soldier turned away from her and walked toward it. Tatiana watched him. Even his walk was from another world; the step was too sure, the stride too long, yet somehow it all seemed right, looked right, felt right. It was like stumbling on a book you thought you had lost. Ah, yes, there it is.Collection: Book
Tatiana realized she was too young to hide well what was in her heart but old enough to know that her heart was in her eyes.Collection: Heart
Oh Alexander," she said, "what do you want from me..." "Everything!" he whispered fiercely.Collection: Want
When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.Collection: Ice Cream
If I can live through this, he thought, I can live through anything. If I can live through this, I WILL live through anything.Collection: Ifs
And that's my point: all great things worth having require great sacrifice worth giving.Collection: Sacrifice
Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.Collection: Father
Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her.Collection: Girl
Tatiana and the soldier were having a silenceCollection: Silence
Will you remember that? Anywhere you are, if you can look up and find Perseus in the sky, find that smile, and hear the galactic wind whisper your name, you'll know that it's me, calling for you... calling you back to Lazarevo. (Alexander)Collection: Wind
Do you see the Field of Mars, where I walked next to my bride in her white wedding dress, with red sandals in her hands, when we were kids?” “I see it well.” “We spent all our days afraid it was too good to be true, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “We were always afraid all we had was a borrowed five minutes from now.” Her hands went on his face. “That’s all any of us ever has, my love,” she said. “And it all flies by.” “Yes,” he said, looking at her, at the desert, covered coral and yellow with golden eye and globe mallow. “But what a five minutes it’s been.Collection: Kids
Open your eyes, soldier,” Tatiana said fondly, caressing his face.“Are you hungry?” “I was hungry,” Alexander said. “But you fed me.” His body was shaking underneath his sheet.Collection: Eye
Tatiana...you and I had only one moment..." said Alexander. "A single moment in time, in your time and mine...one instant, when another life could have still been possible." He kissed her lips. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street. "I know that moment," whispered Tatiana.Collection: Ice Cream
Good-bye, my moonsong and my breath, my white nights and golden days, my fresh water and my fire. Good-bye, and may you find a better life, find comfort again and your breathless smile, and when your beloved face lights up once more at the Western sunrise, be sure what I felt for you was not in vain. Good-bye and have faith, my Tatiana.Collection: Night
I want you to know that should something happen to me, don’t worry about my body. My soul isn’t going to return to it, nor to God. It’s flying straight to you, where it knows it can find you, in Lazarevo. I want to be neither with kings nor heroes, but with the queen of Lake Ilmen.Collection: Kings
He came over in long purposeful strides, sat at the edge of her bed, and in a tender, possessive gesture wiped the lipstick off her lips. “What is that?” he asked. “All the other girls wear it,” Tatiana said, quickly wiping her mouth, breathless at the sight of him. “Including Dasha.” “Well, I don’t want you to have anything on your lovely face,” he said, stroking her cheeks. “God knows, you don’t need it.Collection: Girl
I'm not hungry," Alexander whispered. "I'm famished. Watch out for me. Now, don't make a single sound," he said, moving on top of her. "Tania, God....I'll cover your mouth, just like this, and you hold on to me, just like this, and I'm going to-just like this-Collection: Moving
Tatiana said. "Go on with Dasha. She is right for you. She is a woman and I'm-" "Blind!", Alexander exclaimed. Tatiana stood, desolately failing in the battle of her heart. "Oh, Alexander. What do you want from me..." "Everything", he whispered fiercely.Collection: Heart
The sunshine filtered in through the billowing white curtains. Tatiana knew there would be only an instant, a brief flicker of time that bathed her with the possibilities of the day. In a moment it would all be gone. And in a moment it was. Still...that sun streaking through the room, the distant rumble of buses through the open window, the slight wind. This was the part of Sunday that Tatiana loved most: the beginning.Collection: Sunshine
Alexander to Tatiana: I love you as much as it is possible for a man to love a woman.Collection: Love You
He stared at her fists and at her face and said with upset incredulity, "You promised me you would forgive me-" "Forgive you,"Tatiana hissed through her teeth, tears streaming down her face, "for your brave and indifferent face, Alexander!" She groaned in pain. "Not for your brave and indifferent heart.Collection: Pain
I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled.Collection: Stupidity
Tatiana, I love you. Do you hear me? I love you like I’ve never loved anyone in my whole life. Now, get up. For me, Tatia. For me, please get up and go take care of your sister. Go on. And I’ll take care of you.” His lips kissed her cheek.Collection: Love You
Shura, I’m yours. You may not like it today, you may not want it tonight, you may wish for it all to be different now, but it remains, and I remain, as always, only yours. Nothing can change that. Not your wrath, your fists, your body or your death.Collection: Wrath
Alexander tilted his head and kissed her deeply on the lips. He let go of her hands, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. They kissed as if in a fever... they kissed as if the breath were leaving their bodies.Collection: Letting Go
Where was he, her Alexander, of once? Was he truly gone? The Alexander of the Summer Garden, of their first Lazarevo days, of the hat in his hands, white toothed, peaceful, laughing, languid, stunning Alexander, had he been left far behind? Well, Tatiana supposed that was only right. For Alexander believed his Tatiana of once was gone, too. The swimming child Tatiana of the Luga, of the Neva, of the River Kama. Perhaps on the surface they were still in their twenties, but their hearts were old.Collection: Summer
Tatia: I think its too big to fitCollection: Thinking
Thank you," she whispered, "for keeping yourself alive, soldier." "You're welcome," he whispered back.Collection: Soldier
War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.Collection: War