Top 100 Akhmatova Quotes
#1. Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
Christian Wiman
#2. If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on.
Abraham Verghese
#3. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art was equal to it.
Seamus Heaney
#4. 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. - ANNA AKHMATOVA, FROM POEMS OF AKHMATOVA, TRANSLATED BY STANLEY KUNITZ, WITH MAX HAYWARD
Kristin Hannah
#5. Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
Anna Akhmatova
#6. Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.
Anna Akhmatova
#7. Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.
Anna Akhmatova
#8. I know: yes, no, even I must tear off
The delicate daisy petals.
Everyone on earth is destined to feel
The torments of love.
Anna Akhmatova
#9. 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 ...
Anna Akhmatova
#10. You are many years late; how happy I am to see you
Anna Akhmatova
#11. Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal . . .
Anna Akhmatova
#12. Without love, I'm more at ease, I'm sure.
The sky is high, the mountain wind is sweeping,
And all my thoughts are innocent and pure.
Anna Akhmatova
#13. And it seemed to me that there were fires
Flying till dawn without number
And I never found out things-those
Strange eyes of his-what colour?
Everything trembling and singing and
Were you my enemy or my friend,
Winter was it or summer?
Anna Akhmatova
#14. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#15. For this gloomy beast within my breast -
A heart. But the thing is,
We've all had to learn not to sleep for three years.
In the morning we shall find out
Who has died in the night.
Anna Akhmatova
#16. But I am not allowed to forget
The taste of the tears of yesterday.
Anna Akhmatova
#18. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#19. Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.
Anna Akhmatova
#21. All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.
Anna Akhmatova
#22. The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.
Anna Akhmatova
#23. Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.
Anna Akhmatova
#25. I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
Anna Akhmatova
#26. It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
Anna Akhmatova
#27. He never asks for endearment, all quiet,
Only gazes at me all the time,
And he bears with a blissful smile
This distressing oblivion of mine.
Anna Akhmatova
#28. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#29. Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.
Anna Akhmatova
#30. I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness,
Men into things, not killing humane senses.
You've been turned in to my reminiscences
To make eternal the unearthly sadness.
Anna Akhmatova
#31. No one else was as close and as open,
No one else so boiled my blood,
Even he, who consigned me to torment,
Even he, who caressed and forgot.
Anna Akhmatova
#32. And in the depths of music, I didn't find the answer,
And again there was silence, and again the ghost
of summer.
Anna Akhmatova
#34. There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.
Anna Akhmatova
#35. I'm happy. But some beauty is nonesuch -
The gently sloping path across the wood,
The wretched bridge that's just a little skewed
And that, for which, I won't be waiting much.
Anna Akhmatova
#36. Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief.
Anna Akhmatova
#37. Mary Magdalene beat her breast and sobbed, The beloved disciple turned to stone, But where the silent Mother stood, there No one glanced and no one would have dared.
Anna Akhmatova
#38. That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.
Anna Akhmatova
#39. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#40. And it's not because I'm tortured
Or by some delirium swayed
That I conjure up misfortune:
It is just my trade.
Anna Akhmatova
#41. Let love become the gravestone
That lies upon my life.
Anna Akhmatova
#42. I myself, from the very beginning, Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium Or a reflection in someone else's mirror, Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. Already I knew the list of crimes That I was destined to commit.
Anna Akhmatova
#43. I don't long for anyone,
But I don't want, don't want, don't want
To know how they kiss each other.
Anna Akhmatova
#45. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#46. Three things in this world he loved:
Evensong, white peacocks
And worn maps of America.
He didn't like crying children,
Tea with raspberry jam
Or hysterical women.
And I was his wife.
Anna Akhmatova
#47. He loved three things
in this life:
Vespers, white peacocks,
And old maps of America,
Didn't love children crying,
Raspberries with tea,
Or feminine hysteria
... And I
was his wife.
Anna Akhmatova
#49. Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.
Anna Akhmatova
#50. You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms ...
Anna Akhmatova
#51. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#52. He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
old maps of America.
He hated children crying,
and raspberry jam with his tea,
and womanish hysteria.
...And then he married me.
1911
Anna Akhmatova
#53. As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future
a terrible festival of dead leaves.
Anna Akhmatova
#54. I live like a cuckoo in a clock,
I'm not jealous of the forest birds.
They wind me up - and I cuckoo.
You know - such a fate
I could only wish
For someone I hate.
Anna Akhmatova
#55. The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
Anna Akhmatova
#56. In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.
Anna Akhmatova
#58. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#59. All's taken away: my love and my power.
The body, thrown into city it hates,
Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hour
The blood grows colder in my veins.
Anna Akhmatova
#60. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#61. Song falls silent, music is dumb,
But the air burns with their fragrance,
And white winter, on its knees,
Observes everything with reverent attention.
Anna Akhmatova
#62. I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.
Anna Akhmatova
#63. But then he touched the flowers
With the dry tips of his fingers.
Tell me how men kiss you.
Tell me how you kiss.
Anna Akhmatova
#64. I always think about the past, it's so large and bright.
Anna Akhmatova
#65. Once taken by her, you glowed
And you drank her poisons, content.
Because all the stars seemed to grow,
And fields had a different scent,
Autumn fields.
Anna Akhmatova
#66. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#67. And you, my friends! So few of you remain
That you are dearer daily. I rejoice
In you. How short the road has become,
That once appeared the longest road of all.
Anna Akhmatova
#68. I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love
Anna Akhmatova
#69. I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.
Anna Akhmatova
#70. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#72. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#73. 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 ...
Anna Akhmatova
#74. I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.
Anna Akhmatova
#75. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#76. In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me ... and asked me in a whisper ... "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."
Anna Akhmatova
#78. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#79. It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
Anna Akhmatova
#80. If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.
Anna Akhmatova
#81. But don't raise your eyes in defiance,
Protect my life, my dear.
They're brighter than first violets,
But deadly to me, I fear.
Anna Akhmatova
#82. We are all carousers and loose women here;
How unhappy we are together!
Anna Akhmatova
#83. No other looked into her secret eyes.
Nobody dared.
Anna Akhmatova
#85. Now that you're there, where everything is known-tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us?
Anna Akhmatova
#86. If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.
Anna Akhmatova
#87. Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.
Anna Akhmatova
#88. We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.
Anna Akhmatova
#89. I've ceased to smile long ago,
The bitter winds now chill my lips,
Another hope was just let go,
Another song was added since.
Against my will, I'll cede this song
To people's laughter and offense,
Because love's silence for the soul
Is too unbearably immense.
Anna Akhmatova
#90. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#92. Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.
Anna Akhmatova
#93. The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.
Anna Akhmatova
#94. All my contemporaries
hundred-and-fivers or convicts
will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber.
Anna Akhmatova
#95. It is good here: rustle and snow-crunch ...
Ski tracks on the splendid finery
of the snow; a memory
that long ages ago
we passed here together.
Anna Akhmatova
#96. Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.
Anna Akhmatova
#97. Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed,
And stands there like a window open wide
Into a hushed and brightly lit abode
Where something dreadful has occurred inside.
Anna Akhmatova
#98. I'm not weeping, I'm not complaining,
Happiness is not for me.
Anna Akhmatova
#99. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
#100. 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.
Anna Akhmatova
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