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.

A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.

I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish." - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago

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.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.

Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop.