Quote

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

Boris Pasternak

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Words
Art
Something
People
Discovering
Extraordinary
Ordinary
Saying
Literature

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

Image
How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.
Boris Pasternak
Image
You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
Farewell, 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
Image
In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
Boris Pasternak
Image
How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
Boris Pasternak
Image
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting.
Boris Pasternak
Image
A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
Boris Pasternak
Image
But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.
Boris Pasternak
Image
During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
Boris Pasternak
Image
The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
Boris Pasternak
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Boris Pasternak
Image
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak
Image
All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
Boris Pasternak
Image
They 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
Image
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