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 PASTERNAKIn life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
More Boris Pasternak Quotes
-
-
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
We’re all time’s captives, hostages to eternity.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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 PASTERNAK -
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 -
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 -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
The unarmed power of naked truth.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
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.
BORIS PASTERNAK -
Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
BORIS PASTERNAK