Boris Pasternak

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”

“In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.”

“You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.”

“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump...”

“The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel...”

“February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through t...”

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoul...”

“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.”

“And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

“In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with i...”

“Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.”

“At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.”

“No bad man can be a good poet.”

“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.”

“As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.”

“What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.”

“As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.”

“I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”

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