Every herd is a refuge for listlessness, whether it's a faith in Soviet, or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don't love it sufficiently.

— Boris Pasternak

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.

— Boris Pasternak

Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

— Boris Pasternak

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 Rivas, Race through the nice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rain shower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.

— Boris Pasternak

For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name

— Boris Pasternak

For life, too, is only an instant, Only the dissolving of ourselves In the selves of all others As if bestowing a gift –

— Boris Pasternak

He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages of a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, toward the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them! Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries! And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark.

— Boris Pasternak

Her dark hair was scattered, and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.

— Boris Pasternak

He realized, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

— Boris Pasternak

How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes." These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling...

— Boris Pasternak