Quotes By Author: Anna Akhmatova

“Let my heiress have full rights,Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,How the tortured breast craves air.The love of my friends, my enemies’ rancorAnd the yellow roses in my bushy garden,And a lover’s burning tenderness—all thisI bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.Also the glory for which I was born,For which my star, like some whirlwind, soaredAnd now falls. Look, its fallingProphesies your power, love and inspiration.Preserving my generous bequest,You will live long and worthily.Thus it will be. You see, I am content,Be happy, but remember me.”

“I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch – The gently sloping path across the wood, The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.”

“Flowers, cold from the dew,And autumn’s approaching breath,I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,Which haven’t faded yet.In their nights, fragrantly resinous,Entwined with delightful mystery,They will breathe in her springlikeExtraordinary beauty.But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,From her shing head they will flutterAnd fall—and before herThey will die, faintly fragrant still.And, impelled by faithful longing,My obedient gaze will feast upon them—With a reverent hand,Love will gather their rotting remains.”

“This cruel age has deflected me,like a river from this course.Strayed from its familiar shores,my changeling life has flowedinto a sister channel.How many spectacles I’ve missed:the curtain rising without me,and falling too. How many friendsI never had the chance to meet.”

“As the future ripens in the past,so the past rots in the future –a terrible festival of dead leaves.”

“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.”