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 PASTERNAKHe 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.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It’s forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won’t take it.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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 PASTERNAK -
It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Failure to love is almost like murder.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
BORIS PASTERNAK -
The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
You are eternity’s hostage A captive of mine.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
No bad man can be a good poet.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Mother Russia is on the move, she can’t stand still, she’s restless and can’t find rest, she’s talking and she can’t stop.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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 -
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
BORIS PASTERNAK