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

“Ever since childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.”

“What is laid down, ordered, factual, is never enough to embrace the whole truth; life always spills over the rim of every cup.”

“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.”

“And then, amidst the joy that grips everyone, I meet your mysteriously mirthless gaze, wandering no one knows where, in some far-off kingdom, in some far-off land. What wouldn't I give for it not to be there, for it to be written on your face that you are pleased with your fate and need nothing from anyone”

“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.”

“You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.”