Art & Creativity Quote by Boris Pasternak

Pasternak is quietly daring the writer to do two hard things at once: democratize wonder, and distrust verbal pyrotechnics. “Ordinary people” isn’t a sentimental nod to the common man; it’s a claim about where meaning actually hides - in the daily compromises, private loyalties, and small humiliations that history doesn’t bother to archive. In Pasternak’s Russia, that insistence carried voltage. When public language was being nationalized into slogans, insisting on the extraordinariness of the uncelebrated person becomes a subtle rebuke to any system that treats individuals as raw material for grand narratives.

The second half of the line is the real trapdoor: “ordinary words” delivering “something extraordinary.” Pasternak isn’t praising simplicity as a brand aesthetic; he’s describing an ethical stance. Ordinary words are accountable words. They resist the narcotic fog of abstraction and ideology. They also force the novelist to earn transcendence through precision, not through ornament. The extraordinary has to arise from arrangement, attention, and emotional truth, not from “beautiful” language doing the heavy lifting.

There’s subtext, too, in the symmetry of the sentence: extraordinary/ordinary, ordinary/extraordinary. Literature, in this view, is a reversible operation - it elevates the everyday while bringing the grand back down to human scale. That’s why the line reads like a craft note and a survival strategy: if you can still name real life plainly, you can still keep it real.