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

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

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

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

Beauty is frightening," they will tell you -

Lazily you will arrange

A Spanish shawl on your shoulders,

A red rose in your hair.


"Beauty is simple," they will tell you -

Clumsily with a motley shawl

You will cover a child up,

A red rose on the floor.


But, distractedly heeding

All the words sounding around you,

Sadly lost in thought

You will say about yourself:


'I am neither frightening nor simple;

I am not so frightening, that I would simply

Kill; I am not so simple

That I do not know how frightening life is.'

("For Anna Akhmatova") — Alexander Blok

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

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

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

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

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place. - ANNA AKHMATOVA, FROM POEMS OF AKHMATOVA, TRANSLATED BY STANLEY KUNITZ, WITH MAX HAYWARD — Kristin Hannah

There is a frontier-line in human closeness
That love and passion cannot violate
Though in silence mouth to mouth be soldered
And passionate devotion cleave the heart.
Here friendship, too, is powerless, and years
Of that sublime and fiery happiness
When the free soul has broken clear
From the slow languor of voluptuousness.
Those striving towards it are demented, and
If the line seem close enough to broach
Stricken with sadness ... Now you understand
Why my heart does not beat beneath your touch. — 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

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

The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We've always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant. — 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

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

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

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me ... — Anna Akhmatova

Throughout one's life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabulary absorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance gratifies a subject, however inanimate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastical, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book's suggestion as to what God is. Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry. Akhmatova's — Joseph Brodsky

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

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently. — 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

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

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

True Tenderness"

True tenderness is silent
and can't be mistaken for anything else.
In vain with earnest desire
you cover my shoulders with fur;
In vain you try to persuade me
of the merits of first love.
But I know too well the meaning
of your persistent burning glances. — 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

He never asks for endearment, all quiet,
Only gazes at me all the time,
And he bears with a blissful smile
This distressing oblivion of mine. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one else was as close and as open,
No one else so boiled my blood,
Even he, who consigned me to torment,
Even he, who caressed and forgot. — Anna Akhmatova

I've got no more tears or explanations. — 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

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight — 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 be the gravestone
Lying on my life. — Anna Akhmatova

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything
For his art he dedicated himself
To the Great Work

I admired his single-mindedness
All through my twenties
I argued his case

Now I think he was a jerk
For skipping his daughter's wedding
For fear of losing his focus

He believed in the ancient enmity
Between daily life and the highest work
Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies

It is probably a middle-class prejudice
Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova
Should have raised her son Lev

Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom
Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed
I was not worthy of it

Lev never considered it sufficient
For her to stand outside his prison
Month after month clutching packages

And composing Requiem for the masses — Edward Hirsch

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

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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. — Anna Akhmatova

I myself, from the very beginning, Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium Or a reflection in someone else's mirror, Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. Already I knew the list of crimes That I was destined to commit. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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

Muse

When at night I wait for her to come,
Life, it seems, hangs by a single strand.
What are glory, youth, freedom, in comparison
with the dear welcome guest, a flute in hand?

She enters now. Pushing her veil aside,
she stares through me with her attentiveness.
I question her: 'And were you Dante's guide,
dictating the Inferno?' She answers: 'Yes. — Anna Akhmatova

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

Mary Magdalene beat her breast and sobbed, The beloved disciple turned to stone, But where the silent Mother stood, there No one glanced and no one would have dared. — 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

Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people's houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice...When eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere? (from Anathemas and Admirations) — Emil M. Cioran

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

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. — Anna Akhmatova

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

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

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

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

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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. — Anna Akhmatova

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. — Seamus Heaney

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

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