(1890–1960)
Nobel Prizing-winning Russian poet
Boris Pasternak
About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it’s just the contrary.
Often it’s something you paid no attention to at the time—a vague thought that you didn’t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed—these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.
Doctor Zhivago (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 283.
A book is a cubic piece of burning, smoking conscience—and nothing else.
The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writings on Inspiration and Creation by Angela Livingstone (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 16.