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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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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
Despise
Asks
Hate
Much
Things
Love

More quotes by 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.
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You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
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We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
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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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During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.
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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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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.
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
Boris Pasternak
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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.
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.
Boris Pasternak
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Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?
Boris Pasternak
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Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
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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Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Boris Pasternak
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The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.
Boris Pasternak