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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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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
Lasts
Last
Years
Life
Ceased
Stopped
Exist
Poetry
Literature

More quotes by 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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At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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.
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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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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from 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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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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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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Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
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No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.
Boris Pasternak
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A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.
Boris Pasternak
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You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
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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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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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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Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
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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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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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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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