Anna Akhmatova Quotes
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All the mirrors on the wall show a man not yet appeared who could not enter this white hall. He is no better and no worse, but he is free of Lethe's curse: his warm hand makes a human pledge. Strayed from the future, can it be that he will really come to me, turning left from the bridge?
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All as before: against the dining-room windows Beats the scattered windswept snow, And I have not changed either, But a man came to me. I asked: 'What do you want?' He replied: 'To be with you in Hell.' I laughed: 'Oh, you'll foredoom Us both to disaster.'
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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.
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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.
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A multi-colored crowd streaked about, and suddenly all was totally changed. It wasn't the usual city racket. It came from a strange land.
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I do not need your loving words or hurried kiss as night comes down in the place where we once lived innocent as children, and happier.
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Where are they now, my nameless friends from those two years I spent in hell? What specters mock them now, amid the fury of Siberian snows, or in the blighted circle of the moon? To them I cry, Hail and Farewell! - March 1940
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All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.
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Is this the visitor from the wrong side of the mirror? Or the shape that suddenly flitted past my window? Is it the new moon playing tricks, or is someone really standing there again between the stove and the cupboard?
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I go forth to seek - To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
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From childhood I have been afraid of mummers. It always seemed an extra shadow without face or name had slipped among them...
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I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.
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Besides what have poets, in any case, to do with sin? They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant or die! But what am I trying to say?
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Thinking of the sun causes quick beating of my heart - snowy weather comes on the wind lightly drifting.
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That woman I once was, in a black agate necklace, I do not wish to meet again till the Day of Judgement.
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I hear always the sad voices of summer passing like red winged birds over the high grass
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For seventeen months I have cried aloud calling you back to your lair. I hurled myself at the hangman's foot. You are my son, changed into nightmare. Confusion occupies the world, and I am powerless to tell somebody brute from something human, or on what day the word spells, 'Kill!'
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But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you … more proud...
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The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.
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You thought I was that type: That you could forget me, And that I'd plead and weep And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare...
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In the black sky no star is seen, somewhere in ambush lurks the Angel of Death, but the spices tongues of the masqueraders are loose and shameless A shout: 'Make way for the hero!' Ah yes. Displacing the tall one, he will step forth now without fail and sing to us about holy vengeance...
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No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured Me more, not Even the one who betrayed me to torture, Not even the one who caressed me and forgot.
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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.
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You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.