Top 29 Russian Poetry Quotes
#1. I had placed my stick on the table, as I do every evening. It had been specially made to suit my height, to enable me to walk without too much difficulty. As I was standing up, a customer called to me: 'Monsieur, don't forget your pencil.' It was very unkind, but most funny.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#2. Poor land, poor land, what do you mean
to the heart that moves in me?
Poor love, poor love, poor wife of mine,
why do you weep so bitterly?
(from Retribution book 2, I)
Alexander Blok
#3. Where does such tenderness come from
And what do I do with it, you, sly,
Adolescent, vagabond singer,
Whose lashes couldn't be longer?
Marina Tsvetaeva
#5. 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
#6. For one can live in friendship
With verses and with cards, with Plato and with wine,
And hide beneath the gentle cover of our playful pranks
A noble heart and mind.
Alexander Pushkin
#7. A chestnut-haired child
Cheering up, went
and stood in his stall.
And took the whole incident
like a young colt -
and to live seemed worthwhile,
and to labor,
worthy.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#8. In England and the United States, where physicists have at their disposal equipment of very high voltages, several new elements were prepared using protons and deuterons as projectiles.
Frederic Joliot-Curie
#10. 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
#11. I hope for a light grief in old age.
I was born in Rome and it has returned to me.
My autumn was a kind of she-wolf,
And August - the month of Caesars - smiled at me.
Osip Mandelstam
#12. I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
Clive James
#13. I can't help but think that at the end of your life, when you look back, there'll be a tone. And that tone will come from the essence of how you live your day to day what you did in that between time because that is really your life.
Richard Linklater
#14. It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.
Eric Siblin
#15. After a night of insomnia the body gets weaker,
Becomes dear but no one's - not even your own.
Marina Tsvetaeva
#16. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#17. The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#18. Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
James Fenton
#19. Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that!
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#20. For me, just being how old I am, I know I don't want to be a single mom. I really would rather make it a two-person job. But I've also come to terms with not being a mother at all. I'm actually really good with either direction that my life can take as being a valid experience.
Lisa Edelstein
#21. One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
Marina Tsvetaeva
#23. I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.
F. Sionil Jose
#24. Not sorry, not calling, not crying
All will pass like smoke of white apple trees
Seized by the gold of autumn,
I will no longer be young.
Sergei Yesenin
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. You can't direct yourself but if you're in the moment and you feel it, there's nothing more you can do but hope there was some truth captured for the screen.
Jaime Zevallos
#28. I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.
Osip Mandelstam
#29. How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
