"Perhaps my whisper was already born before my lips."

-- Osip Mandelstam

"'I compare, therefore I am,' so Dante might have put it. He was the Descartes of metaphor. Because matter is revealed to our consciousness (and how could we experience someone else's?) through metaphor alone, because there is no existence outside comparison, because existence itself is comparison."

-- Osip Mandelstam, in Conversations about Dante