Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.

There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.

It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.

I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.

Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.

Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.