Mayakovsky Quotes

The attitude of the American to the dollar contains poetry. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

There's no grandfatherly fondness in me,
There are no gray hairs in my soul!
Shaking the world with my voice and grinning,
I pass you by, - handsome,
Twentytwoyearold. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Soon, sampled by everyone,
Stale and pallid,
I'll come out
And mumble toothlessly
That today I'm
Remarkably candid. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Love's ship has foundered on the rocks of life. We're quits: stupid to draw up a list of mutual sorrows, hurts and pains. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

But I,
from poetry's skies,
plunge into communism,
because
without it
I feel no love. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

The love boat has crashed against the everyday
You and I, we are quits
And there is no use listing mutual hurts, sorrows, and pains. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

There's a monument due me by rank already
I'd blow the damn thing up with dynamite
So strongly I hate every kind of dead thing
So much I adore every kind of life! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

My verse
has brought me
no roubles to spare:
no craftsmen have made
mahogany chairs for my house. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he "ladored,"he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from "lass." "No, no, don't," she said, I must wash, quick-quick, Ada must wash; but for yet another immortal moment they stood embraced in the hushed avenue, enjoying as they had never enjoyed before, the "happy-forever" feeling at the end of never-ending fairy tales. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

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. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Oleg Bard: I understand, but by virtue of that power of imagination which, according to [Georgi] Plekhanov, is granted to Marxists, I can already see as through a prism, so to speak, the triumph of your class as symbolized by your sublime, ravishing, elegant, and class-conscious wedding! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

If an American is motoring on his own, he (the paragon of morality and chastity) will slow down and stop beside every solitary pretty female pedestrian, bare his teeth in a big smile, and tempt her into his car with a wild roll of the eyes. A lady who fails to appreciate his passion will qualify as an idiot who doesn't realise how lucky she is to have the opportunity of getting to know the owner of this 100-horse-power motor car. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Too slow, the wagons of years,
The oxen of days
too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart
our battle-drum. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one's slant accordingly - at least once every ten years. The great heroic devotion to one point of view is very alien to me - it's a lack of humility. Mayakovsky killed himself because his pride would not be reconciled with something new happening within himself - or around him. ~ Boris Pasternak

Maria!
How can I fit a tender word into bulging ears? ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

You entered,
Abrupt like "Take it!",
Mauling suede gloves, you tarried,
And said:
"You know,-
I'm soon getting married."

Get married then.
It's all right,
I can handle it.
You see - I'm calm, of course!
Like the pulse
Of a corpse.

Remember?
You used to say:
"Jack London,
Money,
Love and ardour,"--
I saw one thing only:
You were La Gioconda,
Which had to be stolen!

And someone stole you.

Again in love, I shall start gambling,
With fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows.
And why not?
Sometimes, the homeless ramblers
Will seek to find shelter in a burnt down house!

You're mocking me?
"You've fewer emeralds of madness
than a beggar kopecks, there's no disproving this!"
But remember
Pompeii came to end thus
When somebody teased Vesuvius!

Hey!
Gentlemen!
You care for
Sacrilege,
Crime
And war.
But have you seen
The frightening terror
Of my face
When
It's
Perfectly calm?

And I feel-
"I"
Is too small to fit me.
Someone inside me is getting smothered. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

No-one knows what huge suns will illuminate the life of the future. It may be that artists will transform the grey dust of the cities into hundred-coloured rainbows; that the never-ending thunderous music of volcanoes will be turned into the sound of flutes resounding from mountain ranges; that ocean waves will be forced to play on nets of chords ... ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Love
for us
is no paradise of arbors
to us
love tells us, humming,
that the stalled motor
of the heart
has started to work
again. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Tomorrow you'll forget
that I have crowned you,
that I burned my flowering soul with love,
and the whirling carnival of trivial days
will ruffle the pages of my books…
Would the dry leaves of my words
force you to a stop
gasping for air?
At least let me
pave with a parting endearment
your retreating path.

from "Lilichka! (Instead of a Letter) ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"! ~ Bertolt Brecht

Then there's amortization,
the deadliest of all;
amortization
of the heart and soul. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Have you seen
a dog lick the hand that thrashed it?! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you like
I'll be furious flesh elemental,
or- changing to tones that the sunset arouses- if you like-
I'll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man but - a cloud in trousers. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Listen! If stars are lit It means there is someone who needs it, It means someone wants them to be, That someone deems those specks of spit Magnificent! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

To us love says humming that the heart's stalled motor has begun working again. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Usher: Why do you play only on the black keys [of the piano]? I suppose you think black is good enough for the proletariat. You play on all the keys only for the bourgeoisie, is that it?
Oleg Bard: Please, citizen, please! I'm concentrating on the white ones!
Usher: So you think white is best? Play on both!
Oleg Bard: I am playing on both!
Usher: So you compromise with [the] Whites, opportunist! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Girl: The kid buys a new tie and you curse him like he was Ramsay MacDonald. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals. ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

On I'll pass,
dragging my huge love behind me.
On what
feverish night, deliria-ridden,
by what Goliaths was I begot –
I, so big
and by no one needed? ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

His [Mayakovsky] genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them. ~ Milan Kundera

In the church of my heart the choir is on fire ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky