{"author":"Boris Pasternak","author_id":"Boris+Pasternak","total_quotes":65,"quotes":[{"text":"The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["opinion","russia","social-evils","untruth"],"id":3550,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["history","siberia","soviet-union"],"id":8156,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["surprise","gift","greatest "],"id":31663,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["man","live","prepare "],"id":41310,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["happiness"],"id":58445,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"For life, too, is only an instant,Only the dissolving of ourselvesIn the selves of all othersAs if bestowing a gift –.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["gift","life","self"],"id":61718,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["memory","moments","time"],"id":65484,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["despair","mother","starvation"],"id":66988,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["autobiography","boris-pasternak","poet"],"id":96801,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"},{"text":"It's good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn't correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn't fall into any category, if he's not representative, half of what's demanded of him is there. He's free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.","author":"Boris Pasternak","tags":["individuality","misconception","originality","persona","self"],"id":96826,"author_id":"Boris+Pasternak"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":65,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}