Anna Akhmatova Quotes

My shadow serves as the friend I crave

You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.

All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

Forgive me, that I manage badly, Manage badly but live gloriously, That I leave traces of myself in my songs, That I appeared to you in waking dreams.

Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.

Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.

We learned not to meet anymore, We don't raise our eyes to one another, But we ourselves won't guarantee What could happen to us in an hour.

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.

There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.

The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.

If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.

I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.

I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house

Sweet to me was not the voice of man, But the wind's voice was understood by me. The burdocks and the nettles fed my soul, But I loved the silver willow best of all.

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

The secret of secrets is inside me again.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

... he is rewarded with a form of eternal childhood, with the bounty and vigilance of the stars, the whole world was his inheritance and he shared it with everyone.

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again. Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling is like a festival outside my window.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot survivor of that time, that place.

And you know, I agree to everything: I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy, Darkness will be light and sin lovely.

Song falls silent, music is dumb, But the air burns with their fragrance, And white winter, on its knees, Observes everything with reverent attention.

Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.

Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.

A loss, but who still mourns the breath of one woman, or laments one wife? Though my heart never can forget, how, for one look, she gave up her life.

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me.

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

Let whoever wants to, relax in the south, And bask in the garden of paradise. Here is the essence of north—and it's autumn I've chosen as this year's friend.

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.

This Cruel Age has deflected me.

But Fear and the Muse in turn guard the place Where the banished poet has gone And the night that comes with quickened pace Is ignorant of dawn.

We are all carousers and loose women here; How unhappy we are together!