Boris Pasternak
Russian writer
Lived from: 1890 - 1960
Category: Writers (Contemporary) Country: 
Russia
Born: 10 february 1890 Died: 30 may 1960
Quotes 21 till 40 of 42.
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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.
Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963)― Boris Pasternak -
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 -
Like a beast in a pen, I'm cut off
From my friends, freedom, the Sun.
But the hunters are gaining ground;
I've nowhere else to run.Selected Poems (1983)― Boris Pasternak -
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
― Boris Pasternak -
Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
― Boris Pasternak -
Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.
― Boris Pasternak -
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.
― Boris Pasternak -
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 -
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!
Doctor Zhivago― Boris Pasternak -
One day Lara went out and did not come back.... She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.
Doctor Zhivago (1958) Ch. 15― Boris Pasternak -
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.
LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)― Boris Pasternak -
Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.Doctor Zhivago (1957)― Boris Pasternak -
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
― Boris Pasternak -
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.
― Boris Pasternak -
They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
On Soviet bureaucrats, in LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)― Boris Pasternak -
What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.
― Boris Pasternak -
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
As quoted in Bridges to Infinity : The Human Side of Mathematics (1983)― Boris Pasternak -
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 -
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.
As quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978)― Boris Pasternak -
Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
Doctor Zhivago (1958)― Boris Pasternak
All Boris Pasternak famous quotes and sayings you will always find on greatest-quotations.com (page 2)
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