What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
BORIS PASTERNAKAs in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
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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.
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 -
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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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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But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
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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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At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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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 -
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
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In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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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.
BORIS PASTERNAK