2 Quotes Tagged: foreword

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear — (we all spoke in whispers there):
‘Could you describe this?’
I said, ‘I can!’
Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.