The explosion was deafening and brief. Deafening in Kostia’s soul, like a sudden clap of thunder in a dead silence. Incredible in that boreal night. Kostia saw the thunder burst within him: it was a cloud which swelled, became an enormous black flower fringed with flames, and vanished. -pg. 30, The Case of Comrade Tulayev 

The worst thing is that people are fed up with everything. We’ll swallow defeat, we’ll swallow anything, they think, if only it will stop. They no longer know what the Republic is fighting for. They’re not wrong. What Republic? For whom? They don’t know that history never runs out of ideas, that the worst is always yet to come…They think they have nothing more to lose…  -pgs. 145-46, The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Such and such an answer of Zinoviev’s at the trial in August ’37 was connected with a sentence spoken in ’32 in the courtyard of an isolator, with a speech full of double meanings (seemingly cowardly, but unyielding with a tortuous, calculating devotion), delivered before the Central Committee in ’26; and the thought behind that speech was connected with such and such a declaration by the president of the International, made in ’25, with such and such a remark at a dinner in ’23 when the democratization of the dictatorship was first being discussed…” -pgs. 236-37, The Case of Comrade Tulayev