Anna Akhmatova Quotes
-
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 go forth to seek - To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
-
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.
-
The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
-
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.
-
From childhood I have been afraid of mummers. It always seemed an extra shadow without face or name had slipped among them...
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.'
-
All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.
-
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.
-
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?
-
That woman I once was, in a black agate necklace, I do not wish to meet again till the Day of Judgement.
-
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!'
-
I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.
-
I hear always the sad voices of summer passing like red winged birds over the high grass
-
Thinking of the sun causes quick beating of my heart - snowy weather comes on the wind lightly drifting.
-
The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.
-
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...
-
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...
-
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...
-
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.
-
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.
-
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.