The Orchard Quotes

“Because what good was life without books? Books were our gateway to eternity, our bridges from past to future, from pain to joy.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Living without love was like living in a cave: you were always cold and always in the dark.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“So she wove a wreath from bluebells and delicate white flowers and placed it on my head. It smelled like withered grass, like the end of summer.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Surrounded by my childhood trinkets, those memories that followed me from room to room, I felt my youth returning from the shadows.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“We dreamed about love that would take to our hearts like fire to a forest, burning everything in its wake.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“What if a flaw isn't in the drawing but in the design itself?”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“I thought how things conceived for a good reason could become just as terrifying as things conceived in error and out of spite. And how, amidst all the chaos and the brutality of life, one tried to control a peculiar, alien, intimate world, while longing for the wind to waft away all memory, every residue and odor of the tragic past.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Whoever was to survive was to tell all the stories, so our husbands, if they returned, and our children, if they lived, could remember us.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“After each therapy session, I felt as though a train, a locomotive, had passed through my chest, leaving nothing but silence in its place, a void.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“She hoped that he’d encourage me to talk, to let all the pain out, to free space for her to fill with love and food.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“We were responsible for the dead as much as for the living; we carried them with us always, no matter how heavy the burden. In the end, our burdens defined us, made us who we were.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“We gossiped, too, and seethed with questions, to which no one could provide answers: Are we free now? Can we go anyplace we wish? Can we listen to Tsoi and Queen openly? Can we buy Levi’s jeans? And if Lenin and Stalin were despicable tyrants who’d cheated millions of people out of their beliefs and murdered all those innocent but insubordinate Russians, who is left to lead this country into the future? What is the future? Can we tour the Gulag?”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Occasionally, it would seem to us that we were inside a dinosaur egg, stuck in membranes and mucilage, and that the egg would never hatch and we would never see the world, or that we would die as soon as we came out.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“We also felt free, free from having to grow up, to lie or worry or make fate-altering decisions, from any responsibility other than being teenagers in love with life and all it had to offer at the moment: music, liquor, food, cigarettes, sex, and friendship—the greatest gift we would know.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“But my hunger was a life younger; it was brave, defiant, prompting, while hers was tired and irritable. Hers told her: If you forget about eating, you wouldn’t be needing any food. Mine: You must fight for every morsel, every damn piece of food that came or didn’t come your way.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Try as we might, we couldn’t compare the fragile buckram world of Chekhov to the hit-and-run of ours.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“We knew we had a fate, a destiny, designated by the Communist Party, and it was as irrevocable as the stars or the moon, as life itself.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Like kids who loved and pitied their ill, disabled parents, so did we love and pity our country; we worried for it, and we revered it, and we wished desperately for it to get well.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Sometimes I think we’re like Gogol’s dead souls—we don’t live, only exist on paper.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“There were only two ways to escape such a life—to die or to defect, which was also to die, only slowly and without dignity, rejected by your motherland, your friends and family, everyone whom you loved and who loved you.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“But then she also said that hugging my grandmother was like hugging an old beloved novel, breathing secrets and wisdom from its pages.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“For my grandmother, dependency equaled death because life always ended the way it started—in total darkness, relying on others to exist.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“A storm was brewing in his heart, with rain and hail and mad winds.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Like everything else in this country, our deaths will be long and painful.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“I thought of love then, of how it was supposed to be beautiful and free, and how my mother had always said that it wasn’t a nuclear bomb that would destroy us but lovelessness.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“I switched my eyes to Milka’s face. Winter lived there, with its ferocious winds and dead ossified earth and hard frozen snow.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“I thought of the privilege of knowing someone so long, so intimately, that even a subtle shift of her head or a slight pull of her fingers, could be a sign of worry or love or care.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Or so we felt as we listened to the band play and sing, the heat spreading through us like sun through the orchard in early spring, giving life to everything it touched, every seed, every bud, every blossom.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“But miracles happened, as my mother often said, and in our Soviet universe, a life without an occasional miracle could be a bottomless pit.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard

“Choice lived in her face, the inescapability of a bright future, the right to decide her own fate, how to dress, which school to attend, where to travel on vacation, what to eat.”
― Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, The Orchard