Anna Akhmatova Quotes

Half-closes her eyes — eyelids heavy with
poems.

Thinking of the sun causes quick beating of my heart — snowy weather comes on the wind lightly drifting.

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.

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

Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed, His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared. His mother stood apart. No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared. — 1940-1943

There is no death, each of us knows — it's banal to say. I'll leave it to others to explain.

From childhood I have been afraid of mummers. It always seemed an extra shadow without face or name had slipped among them...

Besides what have poets, in any case, to do with sin? They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant or die! But what am I trying to say?

This woman is sick to her marrow-bone, this woman is utterly alone, with husband dead, with son away in jail. Pray for me. Pray.

Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree. Mute separations, mute black, bloody events in every family. Invisible mourning worn by mothers and wives. Now the arrested are returning, and two Russias stare each other in the eyes: the ones that put them in prison and the ones who were put in prison. A new epoch has begun. You and I will wait for it together.

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... Night.

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. — 1961

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)

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.

I have learned how faces fall to bone, how under the eyelids terror lurks, how suffering inscribes on cheeks the hard lines of its cuneiform texts, how glossy black or ash-fair locks turn overnight to tarnished silver, how smiles fade on submissive lips, and fear quavers in a dry titter. And I pray not for myself alone.. for all who stood outside the jail, in bitter cold or summer's blaze, with me under that blind red wall.