Boris Pasternak

This world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people, and the drunken victim of this order finds pleasure in jeering at one of his own kind, this world was now more hateful to him than ever

I’m with you up to a point. But Lev Nikolaevich says that the more a man gives himself to beauty, the more he distances himself from the good.”

“And you think it’s the other way round? Beauty will save the world, mysteries and all that, Rozanov and Dostoevsky?”

Wait, I’ll tell you what I think myself. I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the

And then into the glut of this gold and marble tastelessness came this one, light and clothed in radiance, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, a Galilean, and from that moment peoples and gods ceased, and man began, man the carpenter, man the tiller, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man without a drop of proud sound, man gratefully dispersed through all mothers’ lullabies and through all the picture galleries of the world

and filled with such scorn for everything in the world that without any loss they might have replaced those words with simple growls, as long as they filled both sides of Kuznetsky with their loud bass voices, shamelessly breathless, as if choking on their own vibrations

It’s all trickery and ambiguity. A single thread is like a spiderweb, pull and it’s gone, but try to free yourself and you get even more entangled.

And the base and weak rule over the strong.

This music was the word of God about life, and Lara went to church to weep over it

Once at the beginning of December, when Lara’s inner state was like Katerina’s in The Storm,12 she went to pray with such a feeling as if the earth were about to open under her and the church’s vaults to collapse

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …

Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion

Yura devoured them both with his eyes. From the semi-darkness, where no one could see him, he looked into the circle of lamplight, unable to tear himself away. The spectacle of the girl’s enslavement was inscrutably mysterious and shamelessly candid. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. Yura’s heart was wrung by their as yet untried power