It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
BORIS PASTERNAKPoetry 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.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
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What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
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It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
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That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It’s forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won’t take it.
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Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy.
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Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
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We’re all time’s captives, hostages to eternity.
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In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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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.
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Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
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He comes as a guest to the feast of existence, and knows that what matters is not how much he inherits but how he behaves at the feast, and what people remember and love him for.
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The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
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As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
BORIS PASTERNAK