Boris Gregoric

“Our homeland in the language we spoke, thought, and wrote in, not the place where we were born. We live in the space of our language, and to expand it, it's not enough to just leave; we need to start thinking in other languages.”
― Dmitry Berkut, Clochard

“True artistic inspiration is always a torment for the artist, almost to the point of endangering his life. Its realisation is tantamount to a physical feat. That is the way it has always been, despite the popular misconception that pretty well all we do is tell stories that are as old as the world, appearing in front of the public like old grannies with scarves on our heads and our knitting in our hands to tell them all sorts of tales in order to keep them amused. The tale may be entertaining or enthralling, but will do only one thing for the audience: help them pass the time in idle chatter.”
― Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“In recent decades I had come to recognize that the overwhelming majority of two-legged creatures commonly known as "humans", whether members of the yellow, white, black, or any other race, belong to the race of unreachables. A majority, or the vast majority - impossible to define it in percentage - cannot, or perhaps never could, be reached by anyone or anything, and certainly not by me or someone like me. Nothing surprises them. Nothing makes them prick up their ears. No ray, no reflection gets through to them. These unreachables lack entirely the capacity for what was once referred to as "keeping your eyes or ears open", even when it comes to "Mother Earth", whether the natural or the human world.”
― Peter Handke, The Fruit Thief: or, One-Way Journey into the Interior

“There was something eternal, something purely Muscovite about Zuyev. It never faded or disappeared, that amazing combination of unarrogant kindness, unaffected goodwill and merry seriousness.”
― Vasily Belov, The Best Is Yet to Come