List of Boris Pasternak Quotes

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.

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.

Everything Established, Settled, Everything To Do With Home And Order And The Common Ground, Has Crumbled Into Dust And Has Been Swept Away In The General Upheaval And Reorganization Of The Whole Of Society. The Whole Human Way Of Life Has Been Destroyed And Ruined. All That's Left Is The Bare, Shivering Human Soul, Stripped To The Last Shred, The Naked Force Of The Human Psyche For Which Nothing Has Changed Because It Was Always Cold And Shivering And Reaching Out To Its Nearest Neighbor, As Cold And Lonely As Itself.

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.

It's Only In Bad Novels That People Are Divided Into Two Camps And Have Nothing To Do With Each Other. In Real Life Everything Gets Mixed Up! Don't You Think You'd Have To Be A Hopeless Nonentity To Play Only One Role All Your Life, To Have Only One Place In Society, Always To Stand For The Same Thing?--ah, There You Are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna In Doctor Zhivago.

But Who Are We, Where Do We Come From When All Those Years Nothing But Idle Talk Is Left And We Are Nowhere In The World?" = Meeting =

Our Evenings Are Farewells. Our Parties Are Testaments. So That The Secret Stream Of Suffering. May Warm The Cold Of Life.

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.

During The Last Years Of Mayakovski's Life, When All Poetry Had Ceased To Exist . . . Literature Had Stopped.

But What Are Pity, Conscience, Or Fear To The Brazen Pair, Compared With The Living Sorcery Of Their Hot Embraces?

Mother Russia Is On The Move, She Can't Stand Still, She's Restless And Can't Find Rest, She's Talking And She Can't Stop.

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.