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.
BORIS PASTERNAKHe was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
No bad man can be a good poet.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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 -
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.
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 -
Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time Be crushed by the spirit of light.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
The unarmed power of naked truth.
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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.
BORIS PASTERNAK