No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.
Boris PasternakReshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about lifeโthey have never felt its breath, its heartbeatโhowever much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
Boris PasternakBut what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?
Boris PasternakThey don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.
Boris PasternakAbout 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 itยดs just the contrary. Often itยดs something you paid no attention to at the time -- a vague thought that you didnยดt 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