217 Quotes by Anna Akhmatova

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.

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

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.

On Hemingway: Have you noticed how lonely all people in his works are – no relatives, no family?

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight.

I always think about the past, it’s so large and bright.

But what would it have cost you to make people happy and agree that you’d had an affair?” She replied very gravely, “I have lived my own unique life, and my life lacks nothing; it has no need to borrow from other people.

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.

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.