Love Quote by Boris Pasternak

Pasternak doesn’t romanticize love as pure uplift; he treats it as a kind of moral weather system. The line insists that “deep and strong feeling” isn’t clean, self-contained, or merely pleasurable. It comes “unmixed with compassion” because real attachment forces a reckoning with fragility: the beloved is not just desirable, but endangered by time, history, the body, bad luck. Love sharpens perception until the world’s ordinary cruelties become personal. That’s the quiet violence in his phrasing: the beloved “seems to us to be a victim.” Not is, necessarily, but seems - because love changes the lens.

The subtext is unsettling. Compassion isn’t only kindness; it can smuggle in pity, and pity can tilt toward possession. If I see you primarily as someone to be protected, I also cast myself as rescuer, interpreter, guardian of your meaning. Pasternak exposes how tenderness can carry a shadow of condescension, how devotion can turn the beloved into a narrative - and “victim” is one of the most powerful narratives we have.

Context matters with Pasternak: a novelist forged by revolution, repression, and the intimate cost of public catastrophe. In a century that made victims at scale, to love someone was to feel their exposure, to anticipate the knock at the door, the sudden disappearance, the small humiliations that accumulate into fate. The sentence works because it refuses sentimentality while explaining why sentiment keeps returning: love doesn’t just enlarge joy; it enlarges vulnerability, and that expansion feels like compassion whether we asked for it or not.