“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.”

“If our enemies take meAnd people stop talking to me,If they confiscate the whole world—The right to breathe, open doors, Affirm that existence shall go onAnd that people, like a judge, shall judge,And if they dare to keep me like an animalAnd fling my food on the floor, I won’t fall silent or deaden the agony,But shall write what I am free to write,My naked body gathering momentum like a bell,And in a corner of the ominous darkI shall yoke ten oxen to my voiceAnd move my hand in the darkness like a ploughAnd, wrung out into a legion of brotherly eyes,Shall fall with the full heaviness of a harvest,Exploding in the distance with all the force of a vow,And in the depths of the unguarded nightThe eyes of that unskilled laborer, earth, shall shineAnd a flock of flaming years swoop down,And like a ripe thunderstorm Lenin shall burst forth.But on this earth (which shall escape decay)There to wake up life and reason will be”

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

“We live without feeling the country beneath our feet, our words are inaudible from ten steps away. Any conversation, however brief, gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man. His greasy fingers are thick as worms, his words weighty hammers slamming their target. His cockroach moustache seems to snicker, and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam. Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains, he toys with the favors of such homunculi. One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps; he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn. Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes, he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead, a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye. Every execution is a carnival that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.”

“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.”

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