“FebruaryBoris PasternakIt's February. Get ink. Weep.Write the heart out about it, singAnother song of FebruaryWhile raucous slush burns black with spring.Six grivnas* for a buggy ridePast booming bells, on screaming gears,Out to a place where drizzles fallLouder than any ink or tearsWhere like a flock of charcoal pears,A thousand blackbirds, ripped awryFrom trees to puddles, knock dry griefInto the deep end of the eye.A thaw patch blackens underfoot.The wind is gutted with a scream.True verses are the most haphazard,Rhyming the heart out on a theme.*Grivna: a unit of currency.”

“February. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo where the ink and all you grievingAre muffled when the rainshower falls.To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,Fall down into the puddles, hurlDry sadness deep into the eyes.Below, the wet black earth shows through,With sudden cries the wind is pitted,The more haphazard, the more trueThe poetry that sobs its heart out. ”

“When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it. ”

“I have always thought that art is not a category, not a realm covering innumerable concepts and derivative phenomena, but that, on the contrary, it is something concentrated, strictly limited. It is a principle that is present in every work of art, a force applied to it and a truth worked out in it. And I have never seen art as form but rather as a hidden, secret part of content…A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art...You can call it an idea, a statement about life, so all-embracing that it can’t be split up into separate words; and if there is so much as a particle of it in any work that includes other things as well, it outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work.”

“Thou hast spread Thy arms to embrace far too many,Flinging Thy hands out till they reach the ends of the crossbeam.”

“Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.”

“The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails.”