Anna Akhmatova Quotes

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

I marvel at everything as if it were new.

I know: yes, no, even I must tear offThe delicate daisy petals.Everyone on earth is destined to feelThe torments of love.

I’m not weeping, I’m not complaining, Happiness is not for me.

And in the depths of music, I didn’t find the answer, And again there was silence, and again the ghost of summer.

But I am not allowed to forgetThe taste of the tears of yesterday.

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

I defendNot my voice, but my silence

And you know, I agree to everything:I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy, Darkness will be light and sin lovely.

Tomorrow the mirrors will mock me

In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.

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

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

Without love, I'm more at ease, I'm sure. The sky is high, the mountain wind is sweeping, And all my thoughts are innocent and pure.

A town loved with bitter love.

Once taken by her, you glowedAnd you drank her poisons, content. Because all the stars seemed to grow, And fields had a different scent, Autumn fields.

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.

My shadow serves as the friend I crave.

Forgive me that I felt forsaken, That grief and angst was all I knew. Forgive me that I kept mistaking Too many other men for you.

No one else was as close and as open, No one else so boiled my blood, Even he, who consigned me to torment, Even he, who caressed and forgot.

All's taken away: my love and my power.The body, thrown into city it hates, Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hourThe blood grows colder in my veins.

Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed, And stands there like a window open wideInto a hushed and brightly lit abodeWhere something dreadful has occurred inside.

Why is it that you still beguile me –As wind, stone, bird – and all the likes? Why is that you smile on me – With sudden summer lightning strikes?

All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.