Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.

In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory.

Man in other people is man’s soul. That is what you are, that is what your conscience breathed, relished, was nourished by all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what then? You have been in others and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory? It will be you, having entered into the composition of the future.

Mademoiselle, like all eccentrics, greatly valued her delusions and would not part with them for anything.

You know nothing, you suspect nothing! What’s going on in the world! Such things are happening! Go to some real local meeting with nonfictional workers, with nonfictional soldiers, not out of books.

It’s only in bad books that living people are divided into two camps and don’t communicate. In reality everything’s so interwoven! What an incorrigible nonentity one must be to play only one role in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean one and the same thing!

What’s haunting you? You shouldn’t give such free rein to troubling thoughts.”