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Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.

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
Ashtray
Ashtrays
Matches
Ritual
Bitter
Beautiful
Hands

More quotes by Anna Akhmatova

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As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.
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It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
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You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.
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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.
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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.
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No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.
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I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
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There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.
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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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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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That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.
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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.
Anna Akhmatova
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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.
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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.
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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.
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