Anna Akhmatova Quotes

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

My shadow serves as the friend I crave

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.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.

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

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

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

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

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.

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

You do not know just what you've been forgiven.

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

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 woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again. Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling is like a festival outside my window.

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.

I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.

The secret of secrets is inside me again.

I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

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.

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

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

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.