Biography

"I have latterly become intolerably repulsive to myself... Had I been persistent in my desire for women I should have had success and reminiscences. Had I been consistent in continence I should have been proudly tranquil."
--Tolstoy, diary June 25, 1853 (tr. Aylmer Maude)

It can seem to me that my mind is entirely full of gray shit, and that nothing more can go in. It lies quivering like a section of dark Jell-O with dust on the surface, collecting, blowing, twinkling.

2 from Boris Pasternak's memoir Safe Passage, pub. 1949 (tr Babette Deutsch):

• "I agreed that formlessness is more complex than form. That an unguarded volubility seems attainable because it is empty. That spoilt by the emptiness of trite patterns we take just that exceptional copiousness coming after long desuetude for the mannerisms of form."

• "The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers."