A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

A deep sigh – an interview with a knife.

Life is a railroad station; soon I will set out – for where? I will not say.

Previously, everything that I love was called – I, now it’s – You. But it’s the same thing.

What am I here for? To listen to my soul.

A poet’s marriage to his time is a forced marriage. A marriage of which – as of any suffered violence – he is ashamed, and from which he tries to tear loose. Poets of the past tear into the past, those of the present into the future, as if time were less time for not being my own! All Soviet poetry is a stake on the future. Solely Mayakovsky, this zealot of his own conscience, this convict of the present day, came to love this present day; overcame, that is, the poet in himself.

There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river.

And I’m starving – in the literal sense. Idiots think hunger – is the body. No, hunger – is the soul, the whole weight of it falls directly on the soul.

Fall asleep then. Sleep. And vanish.

I do not speak. I smoke. Throat tight, as if fingers are squeezing it.