01c. 1925 ADYou and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
02c. 1925 ADI 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.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
03c. 1925 ADThe great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
04c. 1925 ADAnd so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
05c. 1925 ADFebruary. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo where the ink and all you grievingAre 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, hurlDry sadness deep into the eyes.Below, the wet black earth shows through,With sudden cries the wind is pitted,The more haphazard, the more trueThe poetry that sobs its heart out.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
06c. 1925 ADPoetry 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.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
07c. 1925 ADLiterature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
08c. 1925 ADAbout dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often it´s something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn´t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
09c. 1925 ADHer dark hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
10c. 1925 ADEverything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
11c. 1925 ADHe 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.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
12c. 1925 ADArt always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
13c. 1925 ADHow 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...Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
14c. 1925 ADNo one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
15c. 1925 ADThis was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
16c. 1925 ADIt´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
17c. 1925 ADAnd why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
18c. 1925 ADFarewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
19c. 1925 ADThe 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.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
20c. 1925 ADAn old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song’s sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
21c. 1925 ADAs for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
22c. 1925 ADThey loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. 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.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
23c. 1925 ADThey loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. 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 wide expanses they saw on their walks, the rooms in which they lived or met, took more delight in their love than theythemselves did.Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
24c. 1925 ADIt'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?Boris Pasternak / quote ↗
