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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.

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
Life
Deserve
World
Stronger
Word
Another
Many
Loyal
Things
Immortality
Think
Loyalty
Thinking
Indeed

More quotes by 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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Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
Boris Pasternak
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In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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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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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
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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!
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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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.
Boris Pasternak
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We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
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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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
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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.
Boris Pasternak
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As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.
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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What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
Boris Pasternak
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You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
Boris Pasternak
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During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
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