Russian Verse Quotes & Sayings

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

It's okay to be happy, it's okay to live your life exactly the way you want it ... It's okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are. — Derrick Jensen

He is noble who both feels and acts nobly. — Heinrich Heine

If we don't change the way Washington operates we're going to bankrupt our children and grandchildren. — David Dewhurst

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

The Wedding Ring

Although the lamp was out, above its darkness
I saw the bright reflection of a flame.
My soul is bare, stripped to the purest bareness;
It has escaped, transcended all its bounds.

A man, I held desire my dearest treasure.
but I give it, myself, my sacred pain,
my prayers, my ecstasies - all these, O Father,
I give with love to You, most loving one.

And so the hour of limitless surrender
enclosed me in a cloak of flames like wings;
empowered me with the power of Your commandment,
and clothed me in Your holy veil of fire.

So let me stretch my hand out to my brother;
I look in the Face of You, the Fount of Life,
and in the radiance of transfigured torture
I bear my cross, light as a wedding ring. — Zinaida Gippius

she was certain he didn't know how the deep scars that marred his soul were reflecting on his body, like a silent scream for help. — Noa Xireau

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

The Last Toast

I drink to our demolished hose,
to all this wickedness,
to you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass -

And to the dead-cold eyes,
the lie that has betrayed us,
the coarse, brutal world, the fact
that God has not saved us.

1934 — Anna Akhmatova

At the Ball

I chanced to see you. Music played,
Vain chatter filled the place.
It seemed as though a veil were laid
Across your secret face.

Your eyes alone were sad; your way
Of speaking ravished me,
As though I heard a far pipe play,
And on the shores the sea.

How welcome was your look of thought,
Your figure tall and slight;
And that clear laugh with sadness fraught
Is in my heart to-night.

And when the noise of day is stilled
Once more they come to me,
Those eyes with so much sadness filled,
That voice, with gaiety.

Down to the depths of sleep I go,
Where dreams uncaptured move.
But do I love you? Who can know?
Yet this, I think, is love. — Alexei Tolstoy

In a long letter that Shidlovsky wrote to Mikhail in February 1839, he writes equally freely and casually about his urge to go off on a drinking spree with Mikhail, and his flirtations with the wives of friends who aspire to be immortalized in his verse. Shidlovsky, evidently, was one of those "broad" Russian natures, oscillating between the most contradictory moral impulses, that Dostoevsky later so often portrayed. No doubt his complete freedom from any kind of stuffiness constituted one source of the magnetism he exercised on his younger friends. But Shidlovsky's ebullience did not prevent him from plunging into one severe spiritual crisis after another brought on by his torn and divided personality. — Steven Pinker

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 that's the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it. — Phil Knight

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint. — Alexander Hamilton

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

What luck, for governments, that the people are stupid! — Adolf Hitler

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

Poor land, poor land, what do you mean
to the heart that moves in me?
Poor love, poor love, poor wife of mine,
why do you weep so bitterly?

(from Retribution book 2, I) — Alexander Blok

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

He is not only a God of perfect time, but of perfect timing. — Beth Moore

The Expositor's Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976. Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Galatians. Grand — Paul D. Weaver