Boris Pasternak Quotes

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always: They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.

There is nothing steadfast in life but our memories. We are sure of keeping intact only that which we have lost.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Life is an incurable disease.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event - it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.