Top 70 Anna Akhmatova Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.”

— Anna Akhmatova

3. “If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.”

— Anna Akhmatova

4. “Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.”

— Anna Akhmatova

5. “It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.”

— Anna Akhmatova

6. “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.”

— Anna Akhmatova

7. “Wild honey smells of freedom The dust – of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold – smells of nothing.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

9. “The secret of secrets is inside me again.”

— Anna Akhmatova

10. “Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.”

— Anna Akhmatova

11. “My shadow serves as the friend I crave.”

— Anna Akhmatova

12. “I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.”

— Anna Akhmatova

13. “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

14. “And it seemed to me that there were fires Flying till dawn without number And I never found out things-those Strange eyes of his-what colour? Everything trembling and singing and Were you my enemy or my friend, Winter was it or summer?”

— Anna Akhmatova

15. “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.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

17. “Real tenderness can’t be confused, It’s quiet and can’t be heard.”

— Anna Akhmatova

18. “Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

20. “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

21. “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

22. “All that I am hangs by a thread tonight.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

24. “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

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

— Anna Akhmatova

26. “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

27. “Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree.”

— Anna Akhmatova

28. “Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.”

— Anna Akhmatova

29. “Dostoyevsky knew a lot but not everything. He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human you’ll turn into Raskolnikov. But we know now that one can kill five – ten, one hundred people – and go to the theatre in the evening.”

— Anna Akhmatova

30. “The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.”

— Anna Akhmatova

31. “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.”

— Anna Akhmatova

32. “Mary Magdalene beat her breast and sobbed, The beloved disciple turned to stone, But where the silent Mother stood, there No one glanced and no one would have dared.”

— Anna Akhmatova

33. “All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death’s wing flashed ahead.”

— Anna Akhmatova

34. “There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.”

— Anna Akhmatova

35. “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

36. “We are all carousers and loose women here; How unhappy we are together!”

— Anna Akhmatova

37. “No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

39. “And you know, I agree to everything: I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy, Darkness will be light and sin lovely.”

— Anna Akhmatova

40. “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

41. “Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don’t break my heart, don’t ring out.”

— Anna Akhmatova

42. “I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities; that the world is brutal and coarse, that God, in fact, has not saved us.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

44. “I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house.”

— Anna Akhmatova

45. “You do not know just what you’ve been forgiven.”

— Anna Akhmatova

46. “Song falls silent, music is dumb, But the air burns with their fragrance, And white winter, on its knees, Observes everything with reverent attention.”

— Anna Akhmatova

47. “This Cruel Age has deflected me...”

— Anna Akhmatova

48. “Forgive me that I ignored the sun And that I lived in sorrow.”

— Anna Akhmatova

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

— Anna Akhmatova

50. “That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.”

— Anna Akhmatova