Quote

This Cruel Age has deflected me.

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
Deflected
Cruel
Age

More quotes by Anna Akhmatova

Image
All has been looted, betrayed, sold black death's wing flashed ahead.
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
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
Image
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
Image
We are all carousers and loose women here How unhappy we are together!
Anna Akhmatova
Image
Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
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
It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
A land not mine, still forever memorable, the waters of its ocean chill and fresh. Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk, and the air drunk, like wine, late sun lays bare the rosy limbs of the pinetrees. Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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
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
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
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
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
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
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.
Anna Akhmatova
Image
You do not know just what you've been forgiven.
Anna Akhmatova