99+ Anna Akhmatova Quotes on The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Poetry and Embodiment - Quotes.pub

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Will you forgive me these November days?

But what would it have cost you to make people happy and agree that you’d had an affair?” She replied very gravely, “I have lived my own unique life, and my life lacks nothing; it has no need to borrow from other people.

No sadness, my soul’s no more of this world.

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

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.

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.

Love conquers, deceitful and slow, With a soft amateurish refrain. So strange to think – not long ago You weren’t dejected and gray.

I marvel at everything as if it were new.

Forgive me that I ignored the sun And that I lived in sorrow.

Tomorrow the mirrors will mock me.

First as a serpent, it’ll cast its spell Next to your heart, curled up. Then it’ll come as a dove as well, Cooing for days nonstop.

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.

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

A solitary sorceress: her shadow is still visible on the eve of the new moon.

On Hemingway: Have you noticed how lonely all people in his works are – no relatives, no family?

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

Dostoyevsky knew a lot but not everything. He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human you’ll turn into Raskolnikov. But we know now that one can kill five – ten, one hundred people – and go to the theatre in the evening.

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

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

Song falls silent, music is dumb, But the air burns with their fragrance, And white winter, on its knees, Observes everything with reverent attention.

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

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities; that the world is brutal and coarse, that God, in fact, has not saved us.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

This cruel age has deflected me, like a river from this course. Strayed from its familiar shores, my changeling life has flowed into a sister channel. How many spectacles I’ve missed: the curtain rising without me, and falling too. How many friends I never had the chance to meet.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

The secret of secrets is inside me again.

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

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