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Now again we are not supposed to remember the past and think-let alone speak about it. (42: Last Letter)

— Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned (1974)

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More quotes by Nadezhda Mandelstam

The great mass of people thus prefer to glide over the surface of reality, always shirking the effort of trying to understand it.

It is true that "forced labor" is too mild a term for the camps of the twentieth century and that nobody in the world would actually want to go into a camp or gas chamber.

I never ceased to believe in M.'s and Akhmatova's poetry. In our depersonalized world where everything human was silenced, only the poet preserved his "self" and a voice which can still be heard even now.

poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away.

man must answer for everything, particularly for his own soul.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nadezhda Mandelstam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.