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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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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
Turned
Happiness
Around
Without
Unshared
Life
Merging
Ripple
Similar
Genuine

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No bad man can be a good poet.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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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That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
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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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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
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To be a woman is a great adventure To drive men mad is a heroic thing.
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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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Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?
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What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
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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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Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.
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I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.
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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.
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What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.
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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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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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