Dr. Zhivago Quotes

- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak has become my favorite book. A rather long collection, these quotes moved me so deeply, I could not shorten them.

"Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple not as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves. There were more people in the world than there have ever been since, all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being - man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over."

"The dog hated the girl, tore her stockings, growled at her, bared its teeth. It was jealous of her as if fearing that she would infect its master with something human."

"Yura devoured them with his eyes. Unseen in the half darkness, he kept staring into the circle of lamplight. The scene between the captive girl and her master was both ineffably mysterious and shamelessly frank. His heart was torn by contradictory feelings of a strength he had never experienced before.

Here was the very thing which he, Tonia, and Misha had endlessly discussed as 'vulgar,' the force which so frightened and attracted them and which they controlled so easily from a safe distance by words. And now, here it was, this force, in front of Yura's very eyes, utterly real, and yet troubled and haunting, pitilessly destructive, and complaining and calling for help - and what had become of their childish philosophy and what was Yura to do now?"

"Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for animal life.
But, all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and didn't notice it."

"Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble. It's like the headlights on a locomotive - turn them inward and you'd crash."

"And now listen carefully. You in others - this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life - your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."

"The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread crumbs thrown to fishes sink through water."

"This was the moment of spring when the earth emerges from the snow looking much as when the snow trapped it six months earlier. The wood smelled of damp and was heaped with last years leaves like an unswept room where people have been tearing up letters, bills, and receipts for years."

"He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off."

"At childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone. At this vital moment the man's part is as irrelevant as if he had never had anything to do with it, as though the whole thing had dropped from heaven. It is woman, by herself, who brings forth her progeny, and carries it off to some remote corner of existence, a quiet, safe place or a crib. Alone, in silence and humility, she feeds and rears the child…"

"It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life, everything gets mixed up. Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same things?"

"Larisa Feodorovna had realized how unhappy he felt and had no wish to upset him further by painful scenes. She tried to hear him out as calmly as she could. They were talking in one of the empty front rooms. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she was no more conscious of them than the stone statues on the house across the road were of the rain running down their faces. She kept saying softly, 'Do as you think best, don't worry about me. I'll get over it.' She was saying it sincerely, without any false magnanimity, and as she did not know she was crying she did not wipe away her tears.

At the thought that Lara might have misunderstood him, and that he had left her with a wrong impression and false hopes, he nearly turned and galloped straight back, to say what he had left unsaid and above all to take leave of her much more warmly, more tenderly, in a manner more suitable to a last farewell. Controlling himself with difficulty, he continued on his way."

"The wooden houses and pavements on the outskirts of the town…He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages in a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, towards the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them. Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and the icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries. And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark."

"Speech is silver, silence is gold."

"I would say that man is made up of two parts, of God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit is marked by the achievement over many generations of an enormously slow and lengthy work. Such a work was Egypt. Greece was another. The theology of the Old Testament prophets was a third. The last in time, not yet superseded by anything else and still being accomplished by all who are inspired, is Christianity.

To show you the completely new thing it brought into the world in all its freshness - not as you know it and are used to it but more simply, more directly, I should like to go over a few extracts from the liturgy - only a very few, and abridged at that.

Most liturgical texts brings together the concepts of the Old Testament and the New Testament and put them side by side. For instance, the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah and the whole are presented as parallels to the immaculate conception and resurrection of Christ.

Such comparisons bring out, very strikingly, I think, the way in which the Old Testament is old and the Gospel is new. In a number of texts, Mary's motherhood is compared to the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance, there is once verse that begins: 'The Red Sea is the likeness of the virgin bride,' and goes on to say that 'as the sea was impenetrable after its crossing by the Israelites, the Immaculate One was incorrupt after the birth of Emmanuel.' That is to say, after the Jews crossed the Red Sea it became impassable, as before, and the Virgin after giving birth to our Lord was immaculate as before. A parallel is drawn between the two events. What kind of events are they? Both are supernatural, both are recognized as miracles. What then, was regarded as miraculous in each epoch - the ancient, primitive epoch and the later, post-Roman epoch which was far more advanced?

In the first miracle your have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by magic gestures, allowing a whole nation, countless numbers, hundreds of thousands of people, to go through, and when the last man is across the sea closes up again and submerges and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. The whole pictures in the spirit of antiquity - the elements obeying the magician, great jostling multitudes like Roman armies on the march, a people and a leader. Everything is visible, audible, overpowering.

In the second miracle you have a girl - an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world - quietly, secretly bringing forth a child, bringing forth life, bringing forth the miracle of life, the 'universal life,' as He was afterwards called. The birth of her child is not only a violation of human laws as interpreted by the scribes, since it was out of wedlock; it also contradicts the laws of nature. She gives birth not by virtue of a natural process, but by a miracle, by an inspiration. And from now on, the basis of life is to be that inspiration which the Gospel strives to make the foundation of life, contrasting the commonplace with the unique, the weekday with the holiday, and repudiating all compulsion.

What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migrations of a whole people? Why should it have this value in the eyes of heaven? - For it is through the eyes of heaven that is must be judged, it is before the face of the heavens and in the sacred light of its own uniqueness that it all takes place….Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled with the vast expanses of the universe."

"There is some doubt as to whether this does refer to the Magdalene or to one of the other Marys, but anyway, she begs our Lord:

'Unbind my debt as I unbind my hair.' It means, 'As I loosen my hair, do Thou release me from my guilt.' Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?

And later on in the liturgy for the same day there is another, more detailed passages, and this time it almost certainly refers to Mary Magdalene.

Again, she repents in a terribly tangible way over her past, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old inveterate habits. 'For the night is to me the flaring up of lust, the dark, moonless zeal of sin.' She begs Christ to accept her tears of repentance and be moved by the sincerity of her sighs, so that she may dry his most pure feet with her hair - reminding Him that in the rushing waves of her hair Eve took refuge when she was overcome with fear and shame in paradise. 'Let me kiss Thy most pure feet and water them with my tears and dry them with the hair of my head, which covered Eve and sheltered her in its rushing waves when she was afraid in the cool of the day in paradise.' And immediately after all this about her hair, she exclaims: 'Who can fathom the multitude of my sins or the depths of Thy mercy?' What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!"

"But about Varykino. Of course, to go to that wilderness in winter, without food, without strength or without hope - it's utter madness. But why not, my love? Let's be mad, if there is nothing except madness left to us."

"Our days really are numbered. So at least let us have the advantage of them in our own way. Let us use them up saying goodbye to life, being together for the last time before we are parted. We'll say goodbye to everything we hold dear, to the way we look at things, to the way we've dreamed of living and to what our conscience has taught us, and to our hopes and to each other. We'll speak to one another once again the secret words we speak at night, great and pacific like the name of the Asian ocean. It's not just for nothing that you stand at the end of my life, my hidden, forbidden angel, under the skies of war and turmoil, you who arose at its beginning under the peaceful skies of childhood."

"Often since then I have tried to define and give a name to the enchantment that you communicated to me that night, that faint glow, that distant echo, which later permeated my whole being and gave me a key to the understanding of everything in the world.

When you rose out of the darkness of that room, like a shadow in a school girl's dress, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood who you were, with all the tormenting intensity which responded in me: I realized that this scraggy thin little girl was charged, as with electricity, with all the femininity in the world. If I had touched you with so much as the tip of my finger, a spark would have lit up the room and either killed me on the spot or charged me for the whole of my life with magnetic waves of sorrow and longing. I was filled to the brim with tears, I cried and glowed inwardly. I was a mortally sorry for myself, a boy, and still more sorry for you, a girl. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love."

"The vegetable kingdom can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbor of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of evolution and the riddles of life that so puzzle us are contained in the green of the earth, among the trees and the flowers of graveyards. Mary Magdalene did not recognize Jesus risen from the grave, 'supposing him to be the gardener.'"