And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
BORIS PASTERNAKArt is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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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.
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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
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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.
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Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
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Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.
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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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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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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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If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.
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The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
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We must discover security within ourselves.
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The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
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I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.
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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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Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
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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.
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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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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.
BORIS PASTERNAK