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And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.

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
Blessing
Reign
Danger
Letter
Dead
Compared
Horrors
Lying
Relief
Inhuman
War
Broke
Menace
Death
Letters
Dangers
Real
Horror
Spell
Brought
Spells

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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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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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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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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, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.
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We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
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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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As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.
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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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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
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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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The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.
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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.
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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.
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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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Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone all drowns in the Pharisees' hypocrisy.
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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
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The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.
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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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The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
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