Quote of the Day (Boris Pasternak, on the ‘Dearest and Most Important Things’)

“The dearest and most important things [:] earth and heaven, great and ardent feeling, the spirit of creativity, life and death.”—Soviet Nobel Prize-winning poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), describing in a letter to friend Nina Tabidze what he sought to capture in his single novel, Doctor Zhivago, quoted in Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, Volume 2: 1928-1960 (2004)