Anna Akhmatova Quotes

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.

Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief.

Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.

I always think about the past, it's so large and bright.

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.

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

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

I'm not weeping, I'm not complaining,
Happiness is not for me.

No other looked into her secret eyes.
Nobody dared.

You do not know just what you've been forgiven.

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.

There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.

Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible and nocturnal . . .

I've got no more tears or explanations.

But then he touched the flowers
With the dry tips of his fingers.
Tell me how men kiss you.
Tell me how you kiss.

I don't long for anyone,
But I don't want, don't want, don't want
To know how they kiss each other.

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.

Don't kiss me, I am weary -
Death will kiss me.

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

The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.

Tomorrow the mirrors will mock me

If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.

We are all carousers and loose women here;
How unhappy we are together!

This Cruel Age has deflected me ...

If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.

My shadow serves as the friend I crave.

Let love become the gravestone
That lies upon my life.

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.

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

And it's not because I'm tortured
Or by some delirium swayed
That I conjure up misfortune:
It is just my trade.

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 marvel at everything as if it were new.

I know: yes, no, even I must tear off
The delicate daisy petals.
Everyone on earth is destined to feel
The torments of love.

And in the depths of music, I didn't find the answer,
And again there was silence, and again the ghost
of summer.

But I am not allowed to forget
The taste of the tears of yesterday.

You are many years late; how happy I am to see you

All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

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.

In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.

Now that you're there, where everything is known-tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us?

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

Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.

You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms ...

Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.

I defend
Not my voice, but my silence

That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

A town loved with bitter love.

Let love be the gravestone
Lying on my life.

I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.

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.

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.

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.

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future
a terrible festival of dead leaves.