Top 100 Pasternak Quotes
#1. I have finished Pasternak with mixed feelings, which is more than I hoped for.
Samuel Beckett
#2. Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#3. (Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, "No genuine book has a first page.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#4. The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
Boris Pasternak
#5. Poetry searches for music amidst the tumult of the dictionary.
Boris Pasternak
#6. I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.
Boris Pasternak
#7. Now, as never before, it was clear to him that art is always, ceaselessly, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and thereby constantly creates life.
Boris Pasternak
#8. There shall be no more death, Because we have already seen all that, Its old and we are tired of it, And now we need something new, And this new thing is Eternal Life
Boris Pasternak
#9. 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
#10. Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.
Boris Pasternak
#11. 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
#13. 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
#15. No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.
Boris Pasternak
#16. Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great.
Boris Pasternak
#17. And if he were really to do good he would have needed in addition to his principles, a heart capable of violating them - a heart which knows only of particular not of general cases and which achieves greatness in little actions.
Boris Pasternak
#18. He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men
it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.
Boris Pasternak
#19. 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
#21. And then the two basic ideals of modern man- without them he is unthinkable- the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrafice
Boris Pasternak
#22. 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
#23. Thou hast spread Thy arms to embrace far too many,
Flinging Thy hands out till they reach the ends of the crossbeam.
Boris Pasternak
#24. 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.
Boris Pasternak
#25. Don't you see, we are not in the same position. You were given wings to fly above the clouds, but I'm a woman, mine are given me to stay close to the ground and to shelter my young.
Boris Pasternak
#26. As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence.
Boris Pasternak
#27. They came out of the vault intoxicated, not by the mere thought of food, but by the consciousness that they too were of use in the world and did not live in vain, and had deserved the praise and thanks which Tonya would shower on them at home.
Boris Pasternak
#28. For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and a way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one.
Boris Pasternak
#29. Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
Boris Pasternak
#30. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
Boris Pasternak
#31. The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove.
Boris Pasternak
#32. Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.
Boris Pasternak
#34. During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist ... literature had stopped.
Boris Pasternak
#35. If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.
Boris Pasternak
#36. It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.
Boris Pasternak
#37. Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
Boris Pasternak
#38. Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
Boris Pasternak
#39. What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.
Boris Pasternak
#40. Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
Boris Pasternak
#41. You call this a script? Give me a couple of 5,000-dollar-a-week writers and I will write it myself.
Joe Pasternak
#42. In one corner the piano tuner scattered arpeggios live handfuls of beads.
Boris Pasternak
#43. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
Boris Pasternak
#44. As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.
Boris Pasternak
#45. You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease. And boldness is the root of beauty. Which draws us together.
Boris Pasternak
#46. You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.
Boris Pasternak
#48. But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world? = MEETING =
Boris Pasternak
#49. The greatness of a writer has nothing to do with subject matter itself, only with how much the subject matter touches the author.
Boris Pasternak
#50. Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
#52. 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.
Boris Pasternak
#53. Who does more for a nation
the one who makes a fuss about it or the one who, without thinking of it, raises it to universality by the beauty of his actions, and gives it fame and immortality?
Boris Pasternak
#54. The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
Boris Pasternak
#55. And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.
Boris Pasternak
#56. Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple not as in an intestinal obstruction
Boris Pasternak
#57. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself ...
Boris Pasternak
#58. She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new.
Boris Pasternak
#59. No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.
Boris Pasternak
#60. Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
Boris Pasternak
#61. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.
Boris Pasternak
#62. I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
Boris Pasternak
#63. The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
Boris Pasternak
#64. Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.
Boris Pasternak
#66. I truly hope we have opened yet another door for women to share what they have been told they couldn't.
Naava Pasternak Swirsky
#67. If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with a magnetically attractive, plaintive craving and sorrow.
Boris Pasternak
#68. In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will.
Boris Pasternak
#69. Don't let my soul be riddled / by deceit: kill it or, / like fog, it will seep through / a heap of white chaff.
Boris Pasternak
#71. In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
Boris Pasternak
#72. Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
Boris Pasternak
#73. Aren't we sensitive! We're something special. We're cultured. It's too much for us.
Boris Pasternak
#74. There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us. But you said something about being talented
that it makes one different. Now, that does have something to do with us. And talent in the highest and broadest sense means talent for life.
Boris Pasternak
#76. the cow crossly shook her head and craned her neck, mooing plaintively, and beyond the black barns of Meliuzeievo the stars twinkled, and invisible threads of sympathy stretched between them and the cow as if there were cattle sheds in other worlds where she was pitied. Everything
Boris Pasternak
#77. The ancient world was settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.
Boris Pasternak
#78. 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
#79. I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.
Boris Pasternak
#80. 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.
Boris Pasternak
#81. To be a woman is a great adventure;
To drive men mad is a heroic thing.
Boris Pasternak
#82. I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish.
- Lara, from Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
#83. In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles.
Boris Pasternak
#84. 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
#85. And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
Boris Pasternak
#86. She was incomparable in her inspired loveliness. Her arms amazed one, as one can be astonished by a lofty way of thinking. Her shadow on the wallpaper of the hotel room seemed the silhouette of her uncorruption.
Boris Pasternak
#87. Here they are, all in one place. Circle back to them when you need some poetic shine.
It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days,
but revelations, and lavishness of someone's soul inspired, and ablaze.
Boris Pasternak
#88. What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.
Boris Pasternak
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
Boris Pasternak
#93. How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
Boris Pasternak
#94. Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.
Boris Pasternak
#95. I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.
Boris Pasternak
#96. He craved an idea, inspired yet concrete, that would show a clear path and change the world for the better, an idea as unmistakable to a child or an ignorant fool as lightning or a roll of thunder. He craved for something new.
Boris Pasternak
#97. The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
Boris Pasternak
#98. 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
#99. Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.
Boris Pasternak
#100. This was a time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up fire and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a disembodied idea, and the problems of alimentation and fuel supply took the place of food and firewood.
Boris Pasternak
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