"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."
"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."
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Source: LIFE magazine, June 13, 1960.
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More quotes by Boris Pasternak
"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."
"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."
"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."
"Man is born to live, not to prepare for life."
"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."