Top 35 Marina Tsvetaeva Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one’s back they are a heavy weight.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

2. “My favorite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see in a dream. My second favorite is correspondence.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

3. “And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

4. “My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

5. “However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

6. “Women talk about love and silent about lovers, men – on the contrary: Speaking of mistresses, but are silent about love.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

7. “I am a moonbeam, free to go whenever I choose.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

8. “For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

9. “One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

10. “Life is a railroad station; soon I will set out – for where? I will not say.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

11. “I’ll cry about this earth in heaven too.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

12. “My desk, most loyal friend thank you. You’ve been with me on every road I’ve taken. My scar and my protection.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

13. “What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a world where the deepest black is grey, and inspiration is kept in a thermos? with all this immensity in a measured world?”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

14. “No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

15. “How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

16. “I am only a shell where the ocean is still sounding.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

17. “Don’t you know no one can escape the power of creatures reaching out with breath alone?”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

18. “Perhaps we may meet each other in a dream.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

19. “I know wherever you are, there are poems.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

20. “The one that burned the hottest is the first to die.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

21. “In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

22. “I so often remain silent. I am like a wolf in his den hiding my grief, it’s hard on people.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

23. “I just want a humble, murderously simple thing: that a person be glad when I walk into the room.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

24. “I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry...”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

25. “I want to sleep with you, fall asleep and sleep. That magnificent folk word, how deep, how true, how unequivocal, how exactly what it says. Just – sleep. And nothing more. No, another thing: and know right into the deepest sleep that it is you. And more: how your heart sounds. And – kiss your heart.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

26. “A deep sigh – an interview with a knife.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

27. “My soul – born in a nameless place.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

28. “The eclipses of poets are not foretold in the calendar.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

29. “My favorite means of communication is otherworldly: dreams – meeting in dreams.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

30. “A poet’s marriage to his time is a forced marriage. A marriage of which – as of any suffered violence – he is ashamed, and from which he tries to tear loose. Poets of the past tear into the past, those of the present into the future, as if time were less time for not being my own! All Soviet poetry is a stake on the future. Solely Mayakovsky, this zealot of his own conscience, this convict of the present day, came to love this present day; overcame, that is, the poet in himself.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

31. “My love for you was parceled out in days and letters, hours and lines. Hence the unrest.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

32. “There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

33. “The complete concurrence of souls requires the concurrence of the breath, for what is the breath, if not the rhythm of the soul? And thus, in order for people to understand one another, they must walk or lie side by side.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

34. “What am I here for? To listen to my soul.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

35. “Previously, everything that I love was called – I, now it’s – You. But it’s the same thing.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

36. “Fall asleep then. Sleep. And vanish.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

37. “And I’m starving – in the literal sense. Idiots think hunger – is the body. No, hunger – is the soul, the whole weight of it falls directly on the soul.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

38. “Beating soul and breathing blood.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva

39. “I do not speak. I smoke. Throat tight, as if fingers are squeezing it.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva