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An unshared happiness is not happiness.

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
Unshared
Happiness

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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.
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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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She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.
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I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish. - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago
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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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Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
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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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How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?
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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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To be a woman is a great adventure To drive men mad is a heroic thing.
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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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We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
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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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That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
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It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
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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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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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At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.
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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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You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
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