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.
Robert Conquest once suggested that ’a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.
One recalls John Updike’s argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so.
You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you’re fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal.
Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.
Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.
My life looked good on paper – where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don’t want to be alone with their thoughts.
Style isn’t something added on; it’s intrinsic to the perceptions and the way you see life.
When communism failed, it wasn’t a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia.
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.
Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.