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Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.

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
Death
Revelations
Art
Creates
Two
John
Meditates
Great
Genuine
Resembles
Always
Thus
Unending
Life
Concern
Revelation
Constant
Concerns
Artist
Continues

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I am alone all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.
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I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.
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Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
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At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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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.
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The whole wide world is a cathedral I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
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In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
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We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
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Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
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And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
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He 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.
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Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
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