Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternakwas a Soviet and Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 February 1890
CountryRussian Federation
fall writing light
It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.
fall insomnia light
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.
real war lying
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.
art philosophy philosophical
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
mother children men
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.
eternity hostage captives
You are eternity's hostage A captive of mine.
air echoes ears
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.
writing age faust
The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
eternity all-time hostage
We're all time's captives, hostages to eternity.
lyric-poetry complicated immensity
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
men anxious myth
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
truth naked unarmed
... the unarmed power of naked truth.
lonely home dust
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.
sleep men thinking
I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.