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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

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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
Must
Unless
Festivals
Much
Memories
Stone
Like
Turn
Stones
Turns
Memory
Learn
Summer
Today
Window
Rustling
Soul
Kill
Festival
Live
Outside
Ardent

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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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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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Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.
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You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.
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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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Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.
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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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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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If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.
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Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.
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Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
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We are all carousers and loose women here How unhappy we are together!
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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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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 know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.
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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.
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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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