Travels in Siberia Quotes

“Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths—or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“She said being inside a language was like being in a person's house - after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“Then a beat-up car lurched into sight towing an even more beat-up car. As the cars came near, I saw that they were connected back to front by a loop made of two seat belts buckled to each other. That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“Katya talked about how the Russian language is being destroyed by poor education and by the sloppiness of nonnative speakers who ignore case endings and have no conception of verb aspects and don't care. You find the worst speech in the street markets, she said. She called the new, bad Russian that's spreading everywhere "market language" (bazarnii yazyk).”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“In Russia, meanwhile, dedicated young people kept trying to kill the tsar.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“In America we love roads. To be ‘on the road’ is to be happy and alive and free. Whatever lonesomeness the road implies is also a blankness that soon will be filled with possibilities. A road leading to the horizon almost always signifies a hopeful vista for Americans. ‘Riding off into the sunset’ has always been our happy ending. But I could find no happy ending vista here, only the opposite. This land also been called the Convicts’ Road or the Exiles’ Road. Not only was it long and lonesome, but it ran permanently in the wrong direction, from the exiles point of view. Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they’d had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here.

Using a place as punishment may or may not be fair to the people who are punished there, but it always demeans and does a disservice to the place.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

“We came down some stairs into a hall leading to Passport Control. On the floor at the foot of the stairs was a large, vividly red spill of liquid - possibly raspberry syrup, possibly transmission fluid. I tried without success to pick up its smell. Instead I was hit by the smell of Russia, one I’ve encountered often since, all over that country. The components of the smell are still a mystery. There’s a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk, and a sweetness - currant jam, or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots - and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement. Every once in a while, in just the right damp basement in America, I find a cousin of the Russia smell unexpectedly there.”
― Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia