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

More quotes by Boris Pasternak

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Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.
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During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
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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 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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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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Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently
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An unshared happiness is not happiness.
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... the unarmed power of naked truth.
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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.
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No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.
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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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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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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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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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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
Boris Pasternak
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If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.
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.
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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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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.
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