Anna Akhmatova quotes

Anna Akhmatova was a renowned Russian poet, considered one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century Russian literature. Her deeply personal and emotionally intense poetry captured themes of love, loss, and the suffering of her era. She remains a symbol of resilience and artistic integrity under political oppression. Here are 112 of her quotes:

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

We learned not to meet anymore, We don't raise our eyes to one another, But we ourselves won't guarantee What could happen to us in an hour.

Anna Akhmatova

The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.

Anna Akhmatova

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: "she wanted storms.

Anna Akhmatova

The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.

Anna Akhmatova

I go forth to seek - To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.

Anna Akhmatova

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.

Anna Akhmatova

I hear always the sad voices of summer passing like red winged birds over the high grass.

Anna Akhmatova

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.

Anna Akhmatova

Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed, His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared. His mother stood apart. No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.

Anna Akhmatova

I don't know if you're alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade Be mourned serenely in my thought?

Anna Akhmatova

I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.

Anna Akhmatova

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

Anna Akhmatova

Besides what have poets, in any case, to do with sin? They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant or die! But what am I trying to say?

Anna Akhmatova