Quote

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

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
White
Fragrance
Song
Falls
Fall
Knees
Music
Dumb
Everything
Winter
Silent
Reverent
Air
Observes
Attention
Burns

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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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.
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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.
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The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.
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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.
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The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
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I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.
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Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.
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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.
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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.
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The secret of secrets is inside me again.
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All has been looted, betrayed, sold black death's wing flashed ahead.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house
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If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.
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We are all carousers and loose women here How unhappy we are together!
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We learned not to meet anymore, We don't raise our eyes to one another, But we ourselves won't guarantee What could happen to us in an hour.
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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
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