Симпатик

Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind.

What truly brought my spirits down, however, was when I asked one of the extras, a lawyer of aristocrstic appearance, if the conditions in our homeland were as bad as rumored. Let's put it this way, she said. Before the communists won, foreigners were victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. Now it's our own people victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. I suppose that's improvement.

The airing of moral doubts was as tiresome as the airing of domestic squabbles, no one really interested except for the ones directly involved.

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

A nineteenth-century Russian novel and vodka accompanied each other perfectly. Reading a novel while one sipped vodka legitimized the drink, while the drink made the novel seem much shorter than it truly was.