Anna Akhmatova Quotes

I've ceased to smile long ago,
The bitter winds now chill my lips,
Another hope was just let go,
Another song was added since.
Against my will, I'll cede this song
To people's laughter and offense,
Because love's silence for the soul
Is too unbearably immense.

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.

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

This cruel age has deflected me,
like a river from this course.
Strayed from its familiar shores,
my changeling life has flowed
into a sister channel.
How many spectacles I've missed:
the curtain rising without me,
and falling too. How many friends
I never had the chance to meet.

I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch -
The gently sloping path across the wood,
The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed
And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.

All my contemporaries -
hundred-and-fivers or convicts -
will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber.

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

If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly, and my low spirits would brighten up.

My shadow serves as the friend I crave.

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.