Osip Mandelstam > Quotes

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone's bees.

You can't untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through thick life without fear.

For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

Deep in the transparent night they're still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.

― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems (NYRB Classics; 1st edition, August 31, 2004) Originally published 1972”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.”
― Osip Mandelstam

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

“Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.”
― Ossip Mandelstam

“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”
― Osip Mandelstam

“I envy everyone secretly,
I secretly love everything.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“I carry Sorrow, a grey
bird, sluggish, in my chest.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“If our enemies take me
And people stop talking to me,
If they confiscate the whole world—
The right to breathe, open doors,
Affirm that existence shall go on
And that people, like a judge, shall judge,
And if they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor,
I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,
But shall write what I am free to write,
My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,
And in a corner of the ominous dark
I shall yoke ten oxen to my voice
And move my hand in the darkness like a plough
And, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,
Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,
Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,
And in the depths of the unguarded night
The eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shine
And a flock of flaming years swoop down,
And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.
But on this earth (which shall escape decay)
There to wake up life and reason will be”
― Osip Mandelstam

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

“Everything is moved by love.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Stone

“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.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“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.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia

“I love my poor earth because I have seen no other.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“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.”
― Osip Mandelstam

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

“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.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters

“I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.”
― 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.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“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.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time: Selected Prose

“I hope for a light grief in old age.
I was born in Rome and it has returned to me.
My autumn was a kind of she-wolf,
And August - the month of Caesars - smiled at me.”
― Osip Mandel'shtam

“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)”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time: Selected Prose

“One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“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”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia

“We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away.
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man.
His greasy fingers are thick as worms,
his words weighty hammers slamming their target.
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker,
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.

Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.

Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“Я счастлив жестокой обидою,
И в жизни поxожей на сон,
Я каждому тайно завидую
И в каждого тайно влюблен.”
― Osip Mandelstam

“The earth is buzzing with metaphor”
― Osip Mandelstam

“For us, all that's left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically is to be perpetually astonished.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters