Anna Akhmatova Quotes
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Dread. Bottomless dread... I am that shadow on the threshold defending my remnant peace.
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The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
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I don't know if you're alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade Be mourned serenely in my thought?
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As a white stone in the well's cool deepness, There lays in me one wonderful remembrance. I am not able and don't want to miss this: It is my torture and my utter gladness. I think, that he whose look will be directed Into my eyes, at once will see it whole.
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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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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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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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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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I go forth to seek - To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
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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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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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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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All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.