One Night in Winter

War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.

‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly what you please, and truly be yourself.’

Nikolasha and Rosa had died for the romantic delusion: totalitarian love as reckless melodrama and desperate possession, an orchestra of trumpets and thunderbolts. Now he saw clearly that the real poetry of love was a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details.

He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography.

What’s important is not who you love but who loves you.

Sex fills just a few hours of our entire existence, he realized, and yet those precious minutes count more than months and years of our normal lives.

‘What’s Edith Wharton like?’

‘Just like our own barons and princelings here. Our secret world is just like hers but with one crucial difference—it’s Edith Wharton with the death penalty.’

Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have.

‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her.

‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present.’