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That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

Anna Akhmatova

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Anna Akhmatova
Age: 76 †
Born: 1889
Born: June 23
Died: 1966
Died: March 5
Author
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Poet
Translator
Writer
Odesa
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko
Anna Achmatova
Anna Ahmatova
Anna Gorenko
Anna Andreevna Gorenko
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova
Dead
Rest
Smiled
Glad
Ones

More quotes by Anna Akhmatova

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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.
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All has been looted, betrayed, sold black death's wing flashed ahead.
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But Fear and the Muse in turn guard the place Where the banished poet has gone And the night that comes with quickened pace Is ignorant of dawn.
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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.
Anna Akhmatova
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... 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.
Anna Akhmatova
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You do not know just what you've been forgiven.
Anna Akhmatova
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I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house
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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.
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I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.
Anna Akhmatova
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But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud.
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Forgive me, that I manage badly, Manage badly but live gloriously, That I leave traces of myself in my songs, That I appeared to you in waking dreams.
Anna Akhmatova
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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.
Anna Akhmatova
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It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
Anna Akhmatova
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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.
Anna Akhmatova
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All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
Anna Akhmatova
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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 ground whisk the lamps away.
Anna Akhmatova
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Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.
Anna Akhmatova
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There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.
Anna Akhmatova
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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.
Anna Akhmatova
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If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.
Anna Akhmatova