Your Ad Could Go Here Quotes

“Understanding, in fact, is my job, that's what writers are for--to try to understand everyone and everything and put this understanding into words, finished to the gossamer fineness of a rose petal, words made supple and obedient, words cut to hold the reader's mind like a well-made glove that fits like second skin.”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“that was the summer they were all afraid the Russians would take Mariupol, that’s all anyone could talk about, that boring grey industrial city that never had anything going for it except its location on the seashore”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“It occurred to me then that if one went looking for a single image of this revolution, for our own Liberty Leading the People, the young beauty with the orange carnation facing the shields of the riot police would not do no matter how awesome she looked on posters—it would have to be that hunched-over, inconceivably old, indestructible, and uncowed old lady from the Maidan, with her three cupfuls of hot tea—Here, children, warm yourselves, God bless you. Now, that would be the real truth about us, but who’d ever want that old flesh to be their revolution’s allegory?”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“It takes a lifetime to understand that long ago the grown-ups lied to you, that in fact nothing living, neither a flower, nor a rabbit, nor a person, nor a country, can, in fact, be had: they can only be destroyed, which is the one way to confirm they have been possessed.”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“When something frightens them, they do not run but go to face it. They take up arms and go to the front. They are not afraid to live, and to die, too, if they have to: they already know that, too is a part of life.”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“...after three years of war, a death from disease, even if it befell a public figure, had ceased being an event worth talking about.”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“secretly, they both rejoiced, gloried in the fact they had a daughter and not a son, that no matter how many waves of mobilization came, none could bring a draft notice to their home, ever.”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories

“we did not actually warm ourselves with vodka in the cold weather, and remained strictly alcohol-free for the entire three weeks of standing in the streets (that’s what made it clear to these folks that we were different from Russians);”
― Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories