Quotes from Osip Mandelstam

The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.

My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.

Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

I envy everyone secretly, I secretly love everything.

Perhaps the whisper was born before lips, And the leaves in treelessness circled and flew, And those, to whom we impart our experience as bliss, Acquire their forms before we do

I carry Sorrow, a grey bird, sluggish, in my chest.

A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

Everything is moved by love.

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.

I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveler, has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on the hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory.

I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.

From childhood he had been devoted to whatever was useless, metamorphosing the streetcar rattle of life into events of consequence, and when he began to fall in love he tried to tell women about this, but they did not understand him, for which he revenged himself by speaking to them in a wild, bombastic birdy language and exclusively about the loftiest matters.

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle – in the 'what ought to be.

The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream. (The Egyptian Stamp)

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically is to be perpetually astonished.

If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly go mad, if the paintings of all schools and masters should suddenly break loose from the nails, should fuse, intermingle, and fill the air of the rooms with futuristic howling and colours in violent agitation, the result then would be something like Dante's Comedy. Osip Mandelstam, Converation with Dante