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We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.

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
Captives
Hostage
Eternity
Time
Hostages

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
Boris Pasternak
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Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?
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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Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
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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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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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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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
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Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.
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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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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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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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.
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 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