Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Style is not neutral; it gives moral directions.
When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.
Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.
To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.
In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people.
Esprit de l’escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you’d said, wishing you’d done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom.
I think I’m losing my bottle. I think I’m going tonto.
If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say.
Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect.
Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.
The militant Utopian, the perfectibilizer, from the outset, is in a malevolent rage at the obvious fact of human imperfectibility.
Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: ‘He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.