Tsvetaeva Quotes

#1. There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.

Paul Auster

#2. 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

#3. I am a shadow's shade, a lunatic, perhaps,
Of two dark moons.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#4. My favorite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see in a dream. My second favorite is correspondence.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#5. After a night of insomnia the body gets weaker,
Becomes dear but no one's - not even your own.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#6. Think about me lightly,
think of me, and forget.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#7. And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#8. I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry ...

Marina Tsvetaeva

#9. At the skin, my blood calls out to
your heart, my whole sky craves
an island of tenderness.
My rivers tilt towards you.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#10. For the way of the comets is the poet's way.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#11. My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#12. For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#13. I'm kissing you now - across
The gap of a thousand years.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#14. The one that burned the hottest is the first to die.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#15. My desk, most loyal friend thank you. You've been with me on every road I've taken. My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#16. Previously, everything that I love was called
I, now it's
You. But it's the same thing.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#17. In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#18. Women talk about love and silent about lovers, men - on the contrary: Speaking of mistresses, but are silent about love.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#19. 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

#20. The eclipses of
poets are not foretold in the calender.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#21. Don't you know no one can escape the power of creatures reaching out with breath alone?

Marina Tsvetaeva

#22. I kissed you! I witched you!
I laugh at the afterlife's dark.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#23. An amazing observation: it is precisely for feelings that one needs time, not for thought ... Feelings, obviously, are more demanding than thought.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#24. This is where I live.
- I wonder if you still love me?

Marina Tsvetaeva

#25. Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one's back they are a heavy weight.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#26. (Everyday life is like a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.)

Marina Tsvetaeva

#27. Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed
And never purchased there by anyone,
Yet similar to precious wines, my verse can wait
Its time will come.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#28. I have two enemies in all the world,
Two twins, inseparably fused:
The hunger of the hungry and the fullness of the full.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#29. What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a
world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
with all this immensity
in a measured world?

Marina Tsvetaeva

#30. What is the main thing in love? To know and to hide. To know about the one you love and to hide that you love. At times the hiding (shame) overpowers the knowing (passion). The passion for the hidden - the passion for the revealed.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#31. Fall asleep then. Sleep. And vanish.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#32. I refuse to be. In
the madhouse of the inhuman
I refuse to live.
With the wolves of the market place
I refuse to howl ...

Marina Tsvetaeva

#33. Somewhere in the night a
human being is drowning.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#34. I do not speak. I smoke. Throat tight, as if fingers are squeezing it.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#35. How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#36. One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#37. However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#38. I will win you away from every earth, from every sky,
For the woods are my place of birth, and the place to die,
For while standing on earth I touch it with but one foot,
For I'll sing your worth as nobody could or would.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#39. For the path of comets/ is the path of poets: they burn without warming,/ pick without cultivating. They are: an explosion, a breaking in

Marina Tsvetaeva

#40. I have two foes in the world, twins inextricably interrelated -- the hunger of the hungry and the glut of the glutted!

Marina Tsvetaeva

#41. In you, I see the heroines of Shakespeare's tragedies.
You, unhappy lady, were
never saved by anybody.

Marina Tsvetaeva

#42. Bullets they took from us, they took our rifles
Minerals they took, and comrades too:
But while our mouths have spittle in them
The whole country is still armed.

Marina Tsvetaeva