Anna Akhmatova Quotes & Sayings

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

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

How the miracle of our meeting Shone there and sang, I didn't want to return From there to anywhere. Happiness instead of duty Was bitter delight to me. Not obliged to speak to anyone, I spoke for a long while. Let passions stifle lovers, Demanding answers, We, my dear, are only souls At the limits of the world. — Anna Akhmatova

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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

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

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

I've learned to live simply, wisely
I've learned to live simply, wisely,
To look at the sky and pray to God,
And to take long walks before evening
To wear out this useless anxiety.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
And the yellow-red clusters of rowan nod,
I compose happy verses
About mortal life, mortal and beautiful life.
I return. The fluffy cat
Licks my palm and sweetly purrs.
And on the turret of the sawmill by the lake
A bright flame flares.
The quiet is cut, occasionally,
By the cry of a stork landing on the roof.
And if you were to knock at my door,
It seems to me I wouldn't even hear.
(English version by Judith Hemschemeyer
Original Language Russian) — Anna Akhmatova

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.
That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together. — Anna Akhmatova

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed ... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

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

No other looked into her secret eyes.
Nobody dared. — Anna Akhmatova

You thought I was that type: that you could forget me, and that I'd plead and weep and throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare, or that I'd ask the sorcerers for some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift: my precious perfumed handkerchief. 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 ikon, and by the fire and smoke of our nights: I will never come back to you. — Anna Akhmatova

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me ... and asked me in a whisper ... "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can." — Anna Akhmatova

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

This land, although not my native land,
Will be remembered forever.
And the sea's lightly iced,
Unsalty water.
The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,
The air is heady, like wine,
And the rosy body of the pines
Is naked in the sunset hour.
And the sunset itself on such waves of ether
That I just can't comprehend
Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,
Or the mystery of mysteries in me again. — Anna Akhmatova

It is good here: rustle and snow-crunch ...
Ski tracks on the splendid finery
of the snow; a memory
that long ages ago
we passed here together. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

I live like a cuckoo in a clock,
I'm not jealous of the forest birds.
They wind me up - and I cuckoo.
You know - such a fate
I could only wish
For someone I hate. — Anna Akhmatova

I've ceased to smile long ago,
The bitter winds now chill my lips,
Another hope was just let go,
Another song was added since.
Against my will, I'll cede this song
To people's laughter and offense,
Because love's silence for the soul
Is too unbearably immense. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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. — Anna Akhmatova

Let love become the gravestone
That lies upon my life. — Anna Akhmatova

I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness,
Men into things, not killing humane senses.
You've been turned in to my reminiscences
To make eternal the unearthly sadness. — Anna Akhmatova

All's taken away: my love and my power.
The body, thrown into city it hates,
Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hour
The blood grows colder in my veins. — Anna Akhmatova

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

Each and every day, I get
One letter like a bride.
I'm responding to my friend,
Writing late at night:

"On my way into the dark,
I've stopped in white death's den.
My dear, don't leave an evil mark
On another man."

And a brilliant star gleams
Between two trees at night,
Calmly promising that dreams
Will soon be satisfied. — Anna Akhmatova

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's messenger,
his huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed is wife and spoke to her:
'It's not too late, you can look back still

At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
the square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows of that upper storey
where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
her body turned into transparent salt,
and her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
she who gave up her life to steal one glance.

1922-24 — Anna Akhmatova

A town loved with bitter love. — Anna Akhmatova

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight — Anna Akhmatova

I've got no more tears or explanations. — 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

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

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.
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 ...
But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house. — Anna Akhmatova

The celebrations
Of secret nonmeetings are empty,
Unspoken conversations,
Unuttered words.
Glances that don't intersect
Don't know where to come to rest.
And only the tears rejoice
Because they can flow and flow.
Sweetbrier around Moscow,
Alas! Somehow it is here ...
And all this they will call
Love eternal. — 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 secretly in my thought?

All is for you: the daily prayer,
the sleepless heat at night,
and of my verses, the white
flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire.

No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured
me more, not
even the one who betrayed me to torture,
not even the one who caressed me and forgot. — Anna Akhmatova

So many requests, always, from a lover!
None when they fall out of love.
I'm glad the water does not move
under the colourless ice of the river.

And I'll stand - God help me! - on this ice,
however light and brittle it is,
and you...take care of our letters,
that our descendants not misjudge us,

That they may read and understand
more clearly what you are, wise, brave.
In your glorious biography
No row of dots should stand.

Earth's drink is much too sweet,
love's nets too close together.
May my name be in the textbooks
of children playing in the street.

When they've read my grievous story,
may they smile behind their desklids...
If I can't have love, if I can't find peace,
give me a bitter glory.


1913 — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

I'm happy. But some beauty is nonesuch -
The gently sloping path across the wood,
The wretched bridge that's just a little skewed
And that, for which, I won't be waiting much. — Anna Akhmatova

Let my heiress have full rights,
Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.
Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,
How the tortured breast craves air.
The love of my friends, my enemies' rancor
And the yellow roses in my bushy garden,
And a lover's burning tenderness-all this
I bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.
Also the glory for which I was born,
For which my star, like some whirlwind, soared
And now falls. Look, its falling
Prophesies your power, love and inspiration.
Preserving my generous bequest,
You will live long and worthily.
Thus it will be. You see, I am content,
Be happy, but remember me. — 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

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling Is like a festival outside my window. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

And you, my friends who have been called away,
I have been spared to mourn for you and weep,
not as a frozen willow over your memory,
but to cry to the world the names of those who sleep.
What names are those!
I slam shut the calendar,
down on your knees, all!
Blood of my heart,
the people of Leningrad march out in even rows,
the living, the dead: fame can't tell them apart. — Anna Akhmatova

But Fear and the Muse in turn guard the place
Where the banished poet has gone
And the night that comes with quickened pace
Is ignorant of dawn. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

In Dream

Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you.
Why weep? Gove me your hand,
promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high
mountains and we can't move closer.
Just send me word
at midnight sometime through the stars.

1946 — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

Everything's looted, betrayed and traded,
black death's wing's overhead.
Everything's eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?
By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July's sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.
And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin,
something no-one, no-one, has known,
though we've longed for it since we were children. — 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

Seaside gusts of wind,
And a house in which we don't live,
And the shadow of a cherished cedar
In front of a forbidden window ...
Perhaps there is someone in this world
To whom I could send all these lines. Well then!
Let the lips smile bitterly
And a tremor touch the heart again. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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

There are Four of Us

I have turned aside from everything,
from the whole earthly store.
The spirit and guardian of this place
is an old tree-stump in water.

We are brief guests of the earth, as it were,
and life is a habit we put on.
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friendly voices, talking in turn.

Did I say two?...There
by the east wall's tangle of raspberry,
is a branch of elder, dark and fresh.
Why! It's a letter from Marina.


November 1962 (in delirium) — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

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

Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.
In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.
But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shing head they will flutter
And fall-and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.
And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them-
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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

None of the places where I grew up and live in my youth exist any longer: Tsarskoe Selo, Sevastopol, Kiev, Slepnyovo, Gungerburg (Ust-Narova).
The following have survived: Khersones (because it is eternal), Paris - by somebody's oversight, and Petersburg-Leningrad, so that there would be a place to lay my head. — Anna Akhmatova

In human closeness there is a secret edge,
Nor love nor passion can pass it above,
Let lips with lips be joined in silent rage,
And hearts be burst asunder with the love.
And friendship, too, is powerless plot,
And so years of bliss with noble tends,
When your heart is free and known not,
The slow languor of the earthy sense.
And they who strive to reach this edge are mad,
But they who reached are shocked with anguish hard -
Now you know why beneath your hand
You do not feel the beating of my heart. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

For this gloomy beast within my breast -
A heart. But the thing is,
We've all had to learn not to sleep for three years.
In the morning we shall find out
Who has died in the night. — Anna Akhmatova

You invented me. There is no such earthly being,
Such an earthly being there could never be.
A doctor cannot cure, a poet cannot comfort-
A shadowy apparition haunts you night and day.
We met in an unbelievable year,
When the world's strength was at an ebb,
Everything withered by adversity,
And only the graves were fresh.
Without streetlights, the Neva's waves were black as pitch,
Thick night enclosed me like a wall ...
That's when my voice called out to you!
Why it did-I still don't understand.
And you came to me, as if guided by a star
That tragic autumn, stepping
Into that irrevocably ruined house,
From whence had flown a flock of burnt verse. — Anna Akhmatova

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

I defend
Not my voice, but my silence — Anna Akhmatova

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,
Though you are the sister of the river willows,
I will kill you with my singing,
Without spilling your blood on the ground.
Not touching you with my hand,
Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,
But with your unimaginable groans
I will finally slake my thirst.
From her, who wandered the earth before me,
Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,
From her, who still exists in the ether
From her you will set me free. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

All's ringing, roaring, grinding, breakers' crash -
and silence all at once, release:
it means he is tiptoeing over pine needles,
so as not to startle the light sleep of space.
And it means he is counting the grains
in the blasted ears; it means
he has come again to the Daryal Gorge,
accursed and black, from another funeral.
And again Moscow, where the heart's fever burns.
Far off the deadly sleighbell chimes,
someone is lost two steps from home
in waist-high snow. The worst of times ... — Anna Akhmatova

N.V.N.
(translated by Jane Kenyon)
There is a sacred, secret line in loving
which attraction and even passion cannot cross,
even if lips draw near in awful silence
and love tears at the heart.
Friendship is weak and useless here,
and years of happiness, exalted and full of fire,
because the soul is free and does not know
the slow luxuries of sensual life.
Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

All my contemporaries
hundred-and-fivers or convicts
will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber. — Anna Akhmatova

Let whoever wants to, relax in the south,
And bask in the garden of paradise.
Here is the essence of north-and it's autumn
I've chosen as this year's friend. — Anna Akhmatova

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

My shadow serves as the friend I crave. — Anna Akhmatova

Native Soil

There's
Nobody simpler than us, or with
more pride, or fewer tears.
(1922)

Our hearts don't wear it as an amulet,
it doesn't sob beneath the poet's hand,
nor irritate the wounds we can't forget
in our bitter sleep. It's not the Promised Land.
Our souls don't calculate its worth
as a commodity to be sold and bought;
sick, and poor, and silent on this earth,
often we don't give it a thought.
Yes, for us it's the dirt on our galoshes,
yes, for us it's the grit between our teeth.
Dust, and we grind and crumble and crush it,
the gentle and unimplicated earth.
But we'll lie in it, become its weeds and flowers,
so unembarrassedly we call it - ours. — Anna Akhmatova

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. — Anna Akhmatova

Let love be the gravestone
Lying on my life. — Anna Akhmatova

Tomorrow the mirrors will mock me — Anna Akhmatova

Once taken by her, you glowed
And you drank her poisons, content.
Because all the stars seemed to grow,
And fields had a different scent,
Autumn fields. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child. — Anna Akhmatova

Three things in this world he loved:

Evensong, white peacocks
And worn maps of America.

He didn't like crying children,
Tea with raspberry jam
Or hysterical women.

And I was his wife. — Anna Akhmatova

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

The angel of God, having secretly
Betrothed us one winter day,
Watches over our carefree lives
With fixed, darkening eyes
Because of this we love the sky,
Keen air, the fresh wind
And the blackening branches
Behind the iron fence.
Because of this we love the stern
Dark city with its many waterways.
And we love our partings,
And our brief meetings. — Anna Akhmatova

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

I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love — Anna Akhmatova