Anna Akhmatova Quotes (14 Quotes)

If someone someday in this countryDecides to raise a memorial to me,I give my consent to this festivityBut only on this condition - do not build itBy the sea where I was born,I have severed my last ties with the sea...

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.

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.'

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.

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.

Don't leave me, or I'll die of pain.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

That life is a cursed hell:
I've got drunk
On your voice in the doorway.

It isn't me, someone else is suffering.

All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.

On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name.

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.

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

And from my motionless bronze-lidded sockets may the melting snow, like teardrops, slowly trickle and a prison dove coo somewhere, over and over, as the ships sail softly down the flowing Neva.