Boris Pasternak Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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
As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy... Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Boris Pasternak
Even so, one step from my grave,
I believe that cruelty, spite,
The powers of darkness will in time
Be crushed by the spirit of light.

Boris Pasternak
Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.

Boris Pasternak
That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

Boris Pasternak
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.

Boris Pasternak
And there, with frightful listing Through emptiness, away Through unknown solar systems Revolves the Milky Way.

Boris Pasternak
You are eternity's hostage
A captive of time.

Boris Pasternak
With an awful, dreadful list Towards other galaxies unknown Ponderously turns the Milky Way.

Boris Pasternak
Snow, snow over the whole land
across all boundaries.
The candle burned on the table,
the candle burned.

Boris Pasternak
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.

Boris Pasternak
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.

Boris Pasternak
One day Lara went out and did not come back…She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.

Boris Pasternak
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
Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

Boris Pasternak
If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself...

Boris Pasternak
Like a beast in a pen, I'm cut off
From my friends, freedom, the Sun.
But the hunters are gaining ground;
I've nowhere else to run.

Boris Pasternak
The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.

Boris Pasternak
Am I a gangster or a murderer?
Of what crime do I stand
Condemned? I made the whole world weep
At the beauty of my land.

Boris Pasternak
I am caught like a beast at bay.
Somewhere are people, freedom, light,
But all I hear is the baying of the pack,
There is no way out for me.

Boris Pasternak
But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

Boris Pasternak
If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.

Boris Pasternak
Work seethes in the hands of spring,
That strapping dairymaid.

Boris Pasternak
In time to come, I tell them, we'll be equal
to any living now. If cripples, then
no matter; we shall just have been run over
by 'New Man' in the wagon of his 'Plan'.

Boris Pasternak
Most people experience love, without noticing that there is anything remarkable about it.

Boris Pasternak