Anna Akhmatova Quotes

88 Sourced Quotes

If you can't give me love and peace,
Then give me bitter fame.

Anna Akhmatova
Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul
Vicarious tears or a single glance.
And I swear to you by the garden of the angels,
I swear by the miracle-working icon,
And by the fire and smoke of our nights:
I will never come back to you.

Anna Akhmatova
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
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.

Anna Akhmatova
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?

Anna Akhmatova
Thinking of the sun causes quick
beating of my heart —
snowy weather comes on the wind
lightly drifting.

Anna Akhmatova
Creature of special tastes,
you do not wait for gout and fame
to elevate you
to a luxurious jubilee chair,
but bear your triumph
over the flowering heather,
over wildernesses.
And you are guilty of nothing: neither of this,
that, nor anything..

Anna Akhmatova
I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.

Anna Akhmatova
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
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...
Night.

Anna Akhmatova
The word dropped like a stone
on my still living breast.
Confess: I was prepared,
am somehow ready for the test.

Anna Akhmatova
Today I have much work to do:
I must finally kill my memory,
I must, so my soul can turn to stone,
I must learn to live again.

Anna Akhmatova
The silvery tree opens
to an empty sky —
maybe it is better
that I am not your husband.

Anna Akhmatova
I'd like to name the names of all that host
but they snatched up the list and now it's lost.
I've woven them a garment that's prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard,
and will hold fast to every word and glance
all of my days, even in new mischance.

Anna Akhmatova
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
The grave I go to will not be my own.
But if I could step outside myself
and contemplate the person that I am,
I should know at last what envy is.

Anna Akhmatova
This means that gravestones are fragile
and granite is softer than wax.
Absurd, absurd, absurd! From such absurdity
I shall soon turn gray
or change into another person.
Why do you beckon me with your hand?
For one moment of peace
I would give the peace of the tomb.

Anna Akhmatova
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
This woman is sick to her marrow-bone,
this woman is utterly alone,
with husband dead, with son away
in jail. Pray for me. Pray.

Anna Akhmatova
There is no death, each of us knows —
it's banal to say.
I'll leave it to others to explain.

Anna Akhmatova
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?

Anna Akhmatova
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!"

Anna Akhmatova
Are the last days near, perhaps?
I have forgotten your lessons,
prattlers and false prophets,
but you haven't forgotten me.
As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future —
a terrible festival of dead leaves.

Anna Akhmatova
I go forth to seek —
To seek and claim the lovely magic garden
Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

Anna Akhmatova
But I warn you,
I am living for the last time.

Anna Akhmatova
That woman I once was,
in a black agate necklace,
I do not wish to meet again
till the Day of Judgement.

Anna Akhmatova
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
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the supor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

Anna Akhmatova