"Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice."
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Quote collection
Boris Pasternak quotes (page 2 of 6)
106 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth."
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"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup."
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"Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely."
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"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."
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"How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?"
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"A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash."
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"Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!"
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"Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it."
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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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"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."
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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."
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"The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say."
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"The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning."
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"It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it."
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"A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow."
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"February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are 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, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out."
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"It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and humans could breathe freely. It was not until after him that people began to live toward the future. Humans do not die in a ditch like a dog-but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; they die sharing in this work."
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"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it."
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