35 Quotes by Osip Mandelstam

The earth is buzzing with metaphor.

A raznochinets needs no memory – it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

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

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.

I breathed in forbidden life.

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

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.

Sleep is light in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out straight, recalls the length of the trip. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures you, bricks you up. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge...