Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

“Rome was a marketplace of borrowed gods and conquered peoples,

Theosophist,

“But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn’t notice it.

All these twelve years of secondary school and university, Yura had studied classics and religion, legends and poets, the sciences of the past and of nature, as if it were all the family chronicle of his own house, his own genealogy.

Man is a wolf to man.

Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?

I understand intimacy and life quite differently.

I should say the summit of contemporary university knowledge in two fields, mathematics and the humanities. That’s no joke!”

You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first human beings, who had nothing to cover themselves with when the world began, and we are now just as unclothed and homeless at its end.

I don’t know the reason, but the reminder of what life is comes so timely at the moment of taking leave of it and on the threshold of its return.

“Children are unconstrainedly sincere and not ashamed of the truth, while we, from fear of seeming backward, are ready to betray what’s most dear, to praise the repulsive, and to say yes to the incomprehensible.”

No one makes history, it is not visible, just as it is impossible to see grass grow.

“It has already been so several times in history. What was conceived as ideal and lofty became coarse and material. So Greece turned into Rome, so the Russian enlightenment turned into the Russian revolution.