About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it's just the contrary. Often it's something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didn't bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed -- these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.

— Boris Pasternak

After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was himself astonished, his work took possession of him, and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation of the forces controlling the artist is, as it were, stood on its head. The ascendancy is no longer with the artist or the state of mind which he is trying to express, but with language, his instrument of expression. Language, the home and dwelling of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in the sense of outward, audible sounds but by virtue of the power and momentum of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by the force of its own laws, rhyme and rhythm and countless other forms and formations, still more important and until now undiscovered, unconsidered and unnamed. At such moments Yury felt that the main part of his work was not being done by him but by something which was above him and controlling him: the thought and poetry of the world as it was at that moment and as it would be in the future. He was controlled by the next step it was to take in the order of its historical development; and he felt himself to be only the pretext and the pivot setting it in motion.... In deciphering these scribbles he went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough passages had astonished him and moved him to tears by certain unexpectedly successful lines. Now, on re-reading these very lines, he was saddened to find that they were strained and glaringly far-fetched.

— Boris Pasternak

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

— 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

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

— Boris Pasternak

An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song’s sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words.

— Boris Pasternak

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

— Boris Pasternak

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.

— Boris Pasternak

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

— Boris Pasternak

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 =

— Boris Pasternak