Anna Akhmatova Quotes - Page 3

We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.

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.

Song falls silent, music is dumb, But the air burns with their fragrance, And white winter, on its knees, Observes everything with reverent attention.

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

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.

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

... 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.

This land, although not my native land, Will be remembered forever. And the sea's lightly iced, Unsalty water. The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk, The air is heady, like wine, And the rosy body of the pines Is naked in the sunset hour. And the sunset itself on such waves of ether That I just can't comprehend Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world, Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.

This Cruel Age has deflected me.

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 suffered death because she chose to turn.

And it seemed to me that there were fires Flying till dawn without number And I never found out things-those Strange eyes of his-what colour? Everything trembling and singing and Were you my enemy or my friend, Winter was it or summer?

A loss, but who still mourns the breath of one woman, or laments one wife? Though my heart never can forget, how, for one look, she gave up her life.

Let whoever wants to, relax in the south, And bask in the garden of paradise. Here is the essence of north—and it's autumn I've chosen as this year's friend.

Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child.

The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.

Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.

And this tenderness was not like That which a certain poet At the beginning of the century called true And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all— It rang out, like the first waterfall, It crunched like the crust of bluish ice And it prayed with a swanlike voice, And it broke down right before our eyes.

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me.

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 before the implacable iron bars.

We are all carousers and loose women here; How unhappy we are together!

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.