Boris Pasternak Quotes

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.

I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.

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

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. It's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.

I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

And now listen carefully. You in others-this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life-your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you-the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to be a victim.

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

Everything had changed suddenly--the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute--life or truth or beauty--of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new.

He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.

Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction; it's part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space, and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.

I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish." - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago

Credo che non ti amerei tanto se in te non ci fosse nulla da lamentare, nulla da rimpiangere. Io non amo la gente perfetta, quelli che non sono mai caduti, non hanno inciampato. La loro è una virtù spenta, di poco valore. A loro non si è svelata la bellezza della vita.

What an incorrigible nonentity one must be to play only one role in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean one and the same thing!

Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.

There shall be no more death, Because we have already seen all that, Its old and we are tired of it, And now we need something new, And this new thing is Eternal Life

For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name

The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails.

Happy are the downtrodden.

لا أعتقد أن في استطاعتي أن أحبك كثيرًا إذا لم يكن هناك شيئًا تشكو منه أو تندم عليه. أن لا أحب الناس التي لم تسقط أو تتعثر أبدًا. فضيلتهم بلا حياة ولا قيمة. الحياة لم تكشف جمالها لهم.

Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Still more than by the communion of souls, they were united by the abyss that separated them from the rest of the world.

They loved each other greatly. Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it. To them - and this made them unusual - the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of timelessness were moments of revelation, of even greater understanding of life and of themselves.

And if he were really to do good he would have needed in addition to his principles, a heart capable of violating them - a heart which knows only of particular not of general cases and which achieves greatness in little actions.

She has more names than petticoats.

What is laid down, ordered, factual, is never enough to embrace the whole truth; life always spills over the rim of every cup.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breath-takingly serious!

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

The path trodden by wayfarers and pilgrims followed the railway and then turned into the fields. Here Lara stopped, closed her eyes and took a good breath of the air which carried all the smells of the huge countryside. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.

You need to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.

I don't know a movement more self-centered and further removed from the facts than Marxism. Everyone is worried only about proving himself in practical matters, and as for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of their infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore the truth. Politics don't appeal to me. I don't like people who don't care about the truth.

Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one's neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.

For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

And then, amidst the joy that grips everyone, I meet your mysteriously mirthless gaze, wandering no one knows where, in some far-off kingdom, in some far-off land. What wouldn't I give for it not to be there, for it to be written on your face that you are pleased with your fate and need nothing from anyone

I'm broken, I have a crack in me for all my life. I was made a woman prematurely, criminally early, and initiated into life from its worst side, in the false, boulevard interpretation of a self-confident aging parasite from former times, who profited from everything and allowed himself everything.

The sky, drunk with spring and giddy with its fumes, thickened with clouds. Low clouds, drooping at the edges like felt sailed over the woods and rain leapt from them, warm, smelling of soil and sweat, and washing the last of the black armor-plating of ice from the earth.

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.

With you I'm jealous of what is obscure, unconscious, of something in which explanations are unthinkable, of something that cannot be puzzled out. I'm jealous of your toilet things, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the infectious diseases borne on the air, which may affect you and poison your blood.

February Boris Pasternak It's February. Get ink. Weep. Write the heart out about it, sing Another song of February While raucous slush burns black with spring. Six grivnas* for a buggy ride Past booming bells, on screaming gears, Out to a place where drizzles fall Louder than any ink or tears Where like a flock of charcoal pears, A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry From trees to puddles, knock dry grief Into the deep end of the eye. A thaw patch blackens underfoot. The wind is gutted with a scream. True verses are the most haphazard, Rhyming the heart out on a theme. *Grivna: a unit of currency.

Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth.

You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death - then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don't you see, this is just the point - what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life. But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.

Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees.

So what will happen to your consciousness [after you die]? *Your* consciousness, yours, not anyone else's. Well, what are *you*? There's the point. Let's try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity--in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others--this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life--your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you--the you that enters the future and becomes part of it.

I'll stay with you a little, my unforgettable delight, for as long as my arms and my hands and my lips remember you. I'll put my grief for you in a work that will endure and be worthy of you. I'll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow. I'll stay here till this is done, then I too will go. This is how I will portray you, I'll trace your features on paper as the sea, after a fearful storm has churned it up, traces the form of the greatest, farthest-reaching wave on the sand. Seaweed, shells, cork, pebbles, the lightest, most imponderable things that it could lift from its bed, are cast up in a broken, sinuous line on the sand. This line endlessly stretching into the distance is the frontier of the highest tide. That was how life's storm cast you up on my shore, O my pride, that is how I'll portray you.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs. They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than they themselves did.

Ever since childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.

Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let's see. A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble. It's like the headlights on a locomotive - turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka. And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all.

О какая это была любовь, вольная, небывалая, ни на что не похожая! Они думали, как другие напевают. Они любили друг друга не из неизбежности, не «опаленные страстью», как это ложно изображают. Они любили друг друга потому, что так хотели все кругом: земля под ними, небо над их головами, облака и деревья. Их любовь нравилась окружающим еще, может быть, больше, чем им самим. Незнакомым на улице, выстраивающимся на прогулке далям, комнатам, в которых они селились и встречались. Ах вот это, это вот ведь, и было главным, что их роднило и объединяло! Никогда, никогда, даже в минуты самого дарственного, беспамятного счастья не покидало их самое высокое и захватывающее: наслаждение общей лепкою мира, чувство отнесенности их самих ко всей картине, ощущение принадлежности к красоте всего зрелища, ко всей вселенной.

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins—all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, waste space. The first real event since the long interruption was this vertiginous home-coming by train, in the knowledge that his home was still safe, still existing somewhere, with every smallest stone in it dear to him. This was the point of life, this was experience, this was the quest of adventure seekers and what artists had in mind—this coming home to your family, to yourself, this renewal of life.

After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was himself astonished, his work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language, his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed. At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him: the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future. He was controlled by the next step it was to take in the order of its historical development; and he felt himself to be only the pretext and the pivot setting it in motion. ... In deciphering these scribbles he went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough passages had astonished him and moved him to tears by certain unexpectedly successful lines. Now, on re-reading these very lines, he was saddened to find that they were strained and glaringly far-fetched.