Likewise, as we’ll see in a bit, when Tolstoy recounts the thoughts or feelings of his characters, he does this succinctly and precisely, using simple objective sentences that seem factual in their syntax and modesty of assertion.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those “laws of fiction” we’ve been seeking. “The car was dented and red” makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: “The dented red car slowly left the parking lot.” Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot.

We know how things are and how they are not. We know how things tend to work and how they don’t. We know how things mostly go and how they never go. And we like it when a story agrees with our sense of how the world works. It gives us a thrill, and this thrill-at-truth keeps us reading. In a story entirely made up, it’s actually the main thing that keeps us reading. Since everything is invented, we read in a continual state of light skepticism. Every sentence is a little referendum on truth. “True or not?” we keep asking. If our answer is “Yes, seems true,” we get shot out of that little gas station and keep reading.

I dipped my second cookie, astonished as always over what I wouldn’t be able to find on Google but that my mother nevertheless knew.

One child said he slept outside because the house was filled with the cries of nightmares. The doctor had the impression that no conversation took place in houses anymore, only vicious discipline, orders and brutal teasing.

You know, we all came out of the war aged, dearest Anna, with a sense of life and death that does not exist in normal lives. So, how does one look forward if all that exists as soft-weeping wounds? You cannot imagine any future . . . You just lie. And wait.

Just remember. No literary fame is worth it if you betray your country or destroy your people. The more you do it, the less what you have to say will be worth anything. Even when one thinks one’s people are wrong, one stays with them and writes with mercy.