Why Is This Age Worse...?
Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?
In the west the failing light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in
-Anna Akhmatova

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I shall not return my borrowed dust
To the earth,
Like a white floury butterfly.
I will this thinking body -
This charred, bony flesh,
Alive to its own span -
To turn into a street, a country.
-Osip Mandelstam

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Willow
I was raised in checkered silence
in the cool nursery of the young century.
Human voices did not touch me,
it was the wind whose words I heard.
I favoured burdocks and nettles,
but dearest to me was the silver willow,
my long companion through the years,
whose weeping branches
fanned my insomnia with dreams.
Oddly, I have survived it:
out there a stump remains. Now other willows
with alien voices intone
under our skies.
And I am silent... as though a brother had died.
-Anna Akhmatova

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You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you a new way.
-Will Rogers

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We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
-Edward R. Murrow

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The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
-Muhammad Ali

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