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Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Boris Pasternak

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Boris Pasternak
Age: 70 †
Born: 1890
Born: February 10
Died: 1960
Died: May 30
Novelist
Pianist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Moscow
Russian SFSR
Holiwis
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Art
Something
People
Discovering
Extraordinary
Ordinary
Saying
Literature
Words

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

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And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.
Boris Pasternak
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Art 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
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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
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I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish. - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
Boris Pasternak
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... the unarmed power of naked truth.
Boris Pasternak
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And 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
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If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
Boris Pasternak
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All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
Boris Pasternak
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The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
Boris Pasternak
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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
Boris Pasternak
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I have the impression that if he didn't complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.
Boris Pasternak
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That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak
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He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.
Boris Pasternak
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A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.
Boris Pasternak
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It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Boris Pasternak