Osip Mandelstam Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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