Boris Pasternak Quotes

Boris Pasternak — Russian Novelist born on February 10, 1890, died on May 30, 1960

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences... (wikipedia)

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.