Hotel Ukraine Quotes

“Soviet times they had called it the tallest building in Moscow on the grounds that Siberia could be seen from its basement.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“For your own good, Arkady thought. If there were four more hateful words in the language, he had yet to come across them.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“He was hanging suspended deep in a sea of black. The darkness was not merely an absence of light; it was alive, seeking out light and sucking it in.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“Disorientated by waking up in a generic corporate hotel room, and unmoored from a vague sense of reality, he wondered whether the afterlife came in several shades of beige and taupe.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“I wish my dog was as loyal as you,” Marina said, looking at Victor. “You don’t have a dog,” Victor said. “How do you know?” “I can tell dog people. You’re not a dog person. That’s not a compliment.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“They didn’t call it state media—not anymore—but that didn’t make it any less accurate. At least the Soviets had been honest about it, which was to say that they had been so dishonest as to have been totally transparent.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“The foyer looked modern enough—light and bright and polished, generic and inoffensive—but, looking up, one saw the socialist realist painting on the ceiling entitled “Labor and Harvest Day in Hospitable Ukraine” and the bronze statues called “Queen of the Fields” and “Mother.” They weren’t in homage to the Soviet Union, Arkady knew. They weren’t even an affectionate pastiche. It was all parody, an emptiness masquerading as retro chic to give foreigners a false sense of history and locals a false sense of comfort and nostalgia. Arkady had never been a true believer and had not for a moment mourned the loss of the USSR, but even he thought it deserved better than this, served up in chunks of knowingly insulting irony—repackaged, rebranded, sanitized.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“Spring always brought the highest body count, not because more people were killed then, but because the warm weather uncovered any number of corpses that had been hidden under the snow.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“Once more, Arkady thought, you needed only one book to really understand Russia. Not Tolstoy or Pushkin, not Dostoyevsky or Lermontov, but one his mother used to read to him as a child: Through the Looking-Glass, otherwise known as Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“Someone—another world leader, whose name I can’t remember—asked him what the Russian economy was like. ‘Good,’ Yeltsin replied. The other leader asked if he could expand on that a bit. ‘Of course,’ Yeltsin said. ‘Not good.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“close and sometimes distant but always somehow attached.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine

“What utter bullshit,” said Victor.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Hotel Ukraine