Osip Mandelstam Quotes

• 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

  Breathing, People, Forever

  50 Copy quote

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

  Osip Mandelstam

  Russia, People, Poetry Is

  "Hope Against Hope: A Memoir". Book by Nadezhda Mandelstam (Chapter 35), 1970.

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Lips, Bliss, Flew

  26 Copy quote

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

  Osip Mandelstam

  Wings, Turns

  24 Copy quote

• Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be continually amazed.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Mean, Thinking, Kingdoms

  19 Copy quote

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

  Osip Mandelstam

  Earth, Poor

  19 Copy quote

• Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Lips, Born

  Selected Poems (1973), trans. by D. McDuff p. 129

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Air, Cracks, World

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Moving, Home, Heart

  24 Copy quote

• 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.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Black, Earth, Way

  19 Copy quote

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

  Osip Mandelstam

  Judging, Woods, Dense

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Book, Needs

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Garden, Space

  8 Copy quote

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