Boris Pasternak

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats — any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death — then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion ta…"

"They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise."

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

"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 shoulder blades…"