Anna Akhmatova Quotes

51 quotes in 883 categories

• It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
• 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…
• 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…
• All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
• This Cruel Age has deflected me...
• Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.
• 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…
• Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.
• Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.
• All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.
• 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…
• 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.
• There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.
• 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…
• 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…
• I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house
• Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.
• If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.
• During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a…
• You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms...

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