Osip Mandelstam Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Only in war our fate has consummation,
And divination too will perish then.

Osip Mandelstam
We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us,
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.

Osip Mandelstam
O indigence at the root of our lives,
how poor is the language of happiness!
Everything's happened before and will happen again,
but still the moment of each meeting is sweet.

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
A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. Its natural state is that of unceasing sound. Having once seized hold of the air, it will not let it go.

Osip Mandelstam
In poetry, war is always being waged. It is only in periods of social imbecility that there is peace or a peace treaty is concluded. Like generals, the bearers of word roots take up arms against each other. Word roots battle in the darkness, depleting each other's food supplies and the juices of the earth.

Osip Mandelstam
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye, or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

Osip Mandelstam
To read Pasternak's verse is to clear your throat, to fortify your breathing, to fill your lungs; surely such poetry could provide a cure for tuberculosis. No poetry is more healthful at the present moment! It is like koumiss after evaporated milk.

Osip Mandelstam
Petersburg! I still possess a list of addresses, Which will help me to hear the voices of the dead.

Osip Mandelstam
We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
But where there's so much as half a conversation The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention.

Osip Mandelstam
I have studied the science of good-byes,
the bare-headed laments of night.

Osip Mandelstam
No matter how you stars want to shine,
First apply on the dotted line,
We're sure to renew your permission
For shining or writing or extinction.

Osip Mandelstam
The age is rocking the wave
with human grief
to a golden beat, and an adder
is breathing in time with it in the grass.

Osip Mandelstam