Osip Mandelstam Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be continually amazed. — Osip Mandelstam

Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips. — 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

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

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 Mandelstam

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

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

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

The earth is buzzing with metaphor — 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

I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire. — Osip Mandelstam

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

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

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 want you now so awfully, No longer jealous-green, I bring myself as offering Up to the guillotine. — Osip Mandelstam

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

The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders,
But I am no wolf by blood. — Osip Mandelstam

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

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

I am wearied to death with life.
There's nothing it has that I want,
but I celebrate my naked earth,
there's no other world to descant. — Osip Mandelstam

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

I envy everyone secretly,
I secretly love everything. — Osip Mandelstam

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

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

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