This was a time to prepare for the cold weather, to store up fire and wood. But in those days of the triumph of materialism, matter had become a dise… - Boris Pasternak

As it fantasizes, poetry comes across nature. The real, living world is the only project of the imagination which has once succeeded and which still goes on being endlessly successful. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, utterly absorbing. It is not something you are disappointed in next morning. It serves the poet as example, even more than a sitter or a model.

You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.

The main trouble, the root of the future evil, was loss of faith in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the urgings of their moral sense was gone, that now they had to sing to the general tune and live by foreign notions imposed on everyone.