Anna Akhmatova Quotes

... 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.

Oh, my home is not my own –
I lament and rue.
Answer, stranger yet unknown,
I am seeking you!

Now prisoners will come back home, and two Russias will look each other in the eye,
the one that put in prison and
the one that was put in prison.

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.

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.

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.

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

Real tenderness can’t be confused, It’s quiet and can’t be heard.

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.

All as before: against the dining-room windows Beats the scattered windswept snow, And I have not changed either, But a man came to me. I asked: "What do you want?" He replied: "To be with you in Hell." I laughed: "Oh, you'll foredoom Us both to disaster."

In the black sky no star is seen, somewhere in ambush lurks the Angel of Death, but the spices tongues of the masqueraders are loose and shameless A shout: "Make way for the hero!" Ah yes. Displacing the tall one, he will step forth now without fail and sing to us about holy vengeance...

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.

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

Tomorrow the mirrors will mock me

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.