pain acts like a leaven for both word and thought, quickening your sense of reality and the true logic of this world. Without pain you cannot disting… - Nadezhda Mandelstam

How can I forget when our life together was cut short literally in midsentence? The words never said are like a lump in my throat, and the thought of them torments me. (28: Stages in My Life)

whatever his quality, the reader is the final arbiter, and it is for him that I kept M.'s poetry and it is to him that I have handed it over. And now, in this long period we are presently living through, a curious process is taking place: people casually leaf through a volume of poetry and, scarcely aware of what is happening, gradually soak it in, until it stirs their numbed and dormant spirits, waking them up and itself coming to life again as it revivifies those it touches. It is a process of diffusion, of interpenetration, by which at least some people are brought back to their senses and given the strength to shake off their accursed inertia. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here-a sign of unparalleled respect-because they are still capable of living by it.

when her husband is taken away, a woman turns to stone, into an automaton, into I don't know what, the frozen expression I must have had during those last minutes I have seen only on the faces of other women whose husbands had been arrested. (28: Stages in My Life)