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I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn't born into it.

Paullina Simons

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Paullina Simons
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: January 1
Translator
Writer
St. Petersburg
Born
Comes
States
Optimist
Great
Precisely
Way
Tend
Think
Wasn
Thinking
American
Life
United

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There is a very definite Russian heart in me that never dies. I think you're born and you live your life with it and you die with it. I'm very much an American - my books tend to be about American things, but inside there's that sort of tortured, long-suffering, aching, constantly analysing Russian soul underneath the happy American exterior.
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With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.
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Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him. Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.
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When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.
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Courage, Alexan­der,” she whis­pered. “Courage, Ta­tiana.
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This is days and days and months and years and all the minutes in between, just you me.
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You have to keep your audience in your mind if you're writing stuff that you know nobody's going to care about then you should rethink what you're doing!
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Tania, there is so much still ahead of you. Be patient with life
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We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I…” Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young.
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You are my hand grenade, my artillery fire. You have replaced my heart with yourself.
Paullina Simons
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Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her.
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Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: what do you believe in? What do you hope for? But most important - ask: what do you love? ... I know who I am, she thought, taking his hand and turning to the altar. I am Tatiana. And I believe in, and hope for, and love Alexander for life.
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Good-bye, my moonsong and my breath, my white nights and golden days, my fresh water and my fire. Good-bye, and may you find a better life, find comfort again and your breathless smile, and when your beloved face lights up once more at the Western sunrise, be sure what I felt for you was not in vain. Good-bye and have faith, my Tatiana.
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I'm not hungry, Alexander whispered. I'm famished. Watch out for me. Now, don't make a single sound, he said, moving on top of her. Tania, God....I'll cover your mouth, just like this, and you hold on to me, just like this, and I'm going to-just like this-
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I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep going
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You have amazing gifts. Don't squander them. Don't give them out meaninglessly, don't abuse them, don't take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die. -Tatiana and Alexander
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Awash in a flood of hostility and despair, they battled and railed and shattered their bodies on one another, unable to find one strand, one sobering swallow of solace.
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And that's my point: all great things worth having require great sacrifice worth giving.
Paullina Simons
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I love you. I'm blind for you, wild for you. Sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I am telling you now. Everything that's happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through.
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Memory - that fiend, that cruel enemy of comfort.
Paullina Simons