Boris Pasternak Quotes

"A corner draft fluttered the flame, and the white fever of temptation, upswept its angel wings that cast, a cruciform shadow."

"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."

"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."

"As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrified himself."

"Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed."

"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."

"Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it."

"Man is born to live and not to prepare to live."

"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."

"Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life."

"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."

"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it."

"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."

"They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise."

"What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth."

"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup."

"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."

"Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life."

"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."