- Boris Pasternak / Doctor Zhivago
Added 2025-03-07 12:20:35 +0000 UTC“But, first, the idea of social betterment as it is understood since the October revolution doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Second, it is so far from being put into practice, and the mere talk about it has cost such a sea of blood, that I’m not sure that the end justifies the means. And last—and this is the main thing —when I hear people speak of reshaping life it makes me lose my self-control and I fall into despair.
“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.”
