Osip Mandelstam Quotes

I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.

To begin, at the beginning.

We live in a bewildering world.

I frequently hear our present period described as uncertain, confused, chaotic.

Very often at the end of 'The Sopranos' you get the feeling that its not under control, you should be very worried, and life is kind of really, really messed up at lot of times. It leaves you feeling very disconcerted. That was kind of the point of it.

It's a crazy world!

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.

The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.

The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

I was convinced that the world was in the departure and paging.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

I'm all over the place.

Man's greatest fear is chaos.

At this stage of the game, I am not sure what the hell is going to happen.

People seem to be looking for discipline in a topsy-turvy world.

The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it.

I live in a crazy time.