Quote

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

Anna Akhmatova

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Past
Ripens
Rots
Festival
Festivals
Leaves
Terrible
Dead
Future

More quotes by Anna Akhmatova

Image
The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
The secret of secrets is inside me again.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
Anna Akhmatova
Image
Sweet to me was not the voice of man, But the wind's voice was understood by me. The burdocks and the nettles fed my soul, But I loved the silver willow best of all.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me . . . and asked me in a whisper . . . Can you describe this? And I said: I can.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house
Anna Akhmatova
Image
Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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
Image
If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova