Quote

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

More quotes by Anna Akhmatova

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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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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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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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We are all carousers and loose women here How unhappy we are together!
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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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If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.
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Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.
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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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I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
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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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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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I myself, from the very beginning, Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium Or a reflection in someone else's mirror, Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. Already I knew the list of crimes That I was destined to commit.
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Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.
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Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
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It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
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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.
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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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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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That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.
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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.
Anna Akhmatova