It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.
BORIS PASTERNAKIt 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.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
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They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
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In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
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In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.
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The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
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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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Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people’s songs.
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
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Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.
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I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
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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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He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
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Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
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Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
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No bad man can be a good poet.
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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 us to be a victim.
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I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.
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During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
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And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
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Failure to love is almost like murder.
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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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A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
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As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
BORIS PASTERNAK