Quotes from Boris Pasternak

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. Perhaps their surrounding world, the strangers they met in the street, the landscapes drawn up for them to see on their walks, the rooms in which they lived and loved, were even more pleased with their love than they were themselves.

The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia's letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.

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?

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breath-takingly serious!

Her dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.

Only the superfluous is sordid

While the music played a whole eternity went by like life in a novel

Life is not as easy as croosing a field

It's good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn't correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn't fall into any category, if he's not representative, half of what's demanded of him is there. He's free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.

How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes. These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling...

They all laughed and clapped, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he had no idea what he was saying, so great was his foreboding of misfortune and his feeling of powerlessness over the future, however great his thirst for goodness and his capacity for happiness.

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.

It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?

Men who are not free always idealize their bondage.

Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.

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.

As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.

The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it ...Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help.

They really thought what other people sing in songs.

Man in other people is man's soul. That is what you are, that is what your conscience breathed, relished, was nourished by all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what then? You have been in others and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory? It will be you, having entered into the composition of the future.

But it turns out that those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil, they aren't happy with anything that's on less than a world scale. For them transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know anything except that.

How can you be yourself when you are being blown in a million different directions you can't control?

The position could not have been made clearer, whatever had been said, not only to those directly involved but to Sasha, Nyusha and Bacchus; their painful embarrassment communicated itself even to the mare, the foal, the golden rays of the setting sun and the gnats buzzing and swarming around Helen's face and neck.

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.