Grossman’s capacity to capture, with simplicity and delicacy, the nature and strength of love in many contexts is always touching.  Here he conveys something of the closeness of a long marriage.  I am not yet grey-haired and haven’t been married long, but we have been together nearly 15 years and I still go to the window to watch when my husband gets into his car. 

But then their eyes met, and the love between them put right everything that was wrong.  For twenty-eight years they had lived together without ever being separated; it is hard to understand or explain the relationship of people who have lived together for almost a third of a century.  She was grey-haired now; she would walk across to the window and watch as he, her grey-haired husband, got into his car. 

See our celebration of another masterwork of Grossman, Life and Fate, possibly the greatest novel of the 20th century, including a lavish deck of illustrated quotations.

Source: Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Anna Aslanyan (London: Vintage Books, 2011), p. 11

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