Boris Pasternak Quotes

For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia’s letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.

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.

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?

I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one’s slant accordingly—at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me—it’s a lack of humility. Mayakovsky killed himself because his pride would not be reconciled with something new happening within himself—or around him.

Or again, take your red banner. You think it's a flag, isn't that what you think? Well, it isn't a flag. It's the purple kerchief of the death woman, she uses it for luring. And why for luring? She waves it and she nods and winks and lures young men to come and be killed, then she sends famine and plague. That's what it is. And you went and believed her. You thought it was a flag. You thought it was: "Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.

How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes."These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling...

February. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo where the ink and all you grievingAre muffled when the rainshower falls.To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,Fall down into the puddles, hurlDry sadness deep into the eyes.Below, the wet black earth shows through,With sudden cries the wind is pitted,The more haphazard, the more trueThe poetry that sobs its heart out.

The sky, drunk with spring and giddy with its fumes, thickened with clouds. Low clouds, drooping at the edges like felt sailed over the woods and rain leapt from them, warm, smelling of soil and sweat, and washing the last of the black armor-plating of ice from the earth.

It seemed as if the valley were not always girded by woods, growing on the surrounding hills and facing away from the horizon, but the trees had only taken up their places now, rising out of the ground to offer their condolences. He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour like a crowd of persistent friends, almost said to the lingering afterglow, 'thank you, thank you, I'll be all right.'

Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.