Skip to content

Why were they all so eager for fame? Surely nothing was ever less worth thinking about. (p 427)

— Nadezhda Mandelstam Hope Abandoned (1974)

Another quote →

Topics

Fame

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.

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

Hope Abandoned (1974)

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

All Nadezhda Mandelstam quotes →

You may also like

Artists shouldn't be made famous.

Kate Bush

Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension.

Jorge Luis Borges The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

Men the most infamous are fond of fame,
And those who fear not guilt yet start at shame.

Charles Churchill The Author (1763)

In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.

Andy Warhol

Attribution

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.