“I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

“And after his death - or even before it, perhaps - he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed The Poet. And another old man - or was it the same one? - lived in the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam - which, for all I know, he may have been. That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones.”

“On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!”

“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 love my poor earth because I have seen no other.”

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

“And I walk out of spaceInto an overgrown garden of values,And tear up seeming stabilityAnd self-comprehension of causes.And your, infinity, textbookI read by myself, without people -Leafless, savage medical book,A problem book of gigantic radicals.”