“...Alexei Tolstoy,Leonov, and Zoshenko had demanded that Tukhachevsky be shot. Pasternak ought to be added to them.Yes,even Pasternak couldn't stand the pressure.Vadim trembled with joy when he saw his name among the rest.."Tell me dear what millennium is it outside? This one!Everyone signed--Vsevolod Vishnevsky,Vasily Grossman,Tynyanov,Paustovsky,Konstantin Simonov,Antokolsky,Fedin,Sholokhov,Fadeyev,Tikhonov,all of them...Is that considered the normal order of things?”

“Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.”

“Give me, for my life,all lives,give me all the painof everyone, I'm going to turn it into hope.Give me all the joys,even the most secret,because otherwisehow will these things be known?I have to tell them,give methe laborsof everyday,for that's what I sing.”

“There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?”

“All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was." "No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”

“He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered...He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.”