Happy birthday, Anna Akhmatova! Here are some quotes from the writer.
“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.”
“I marvel at everything as if it were new.”
“Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible, and nocturnal…”
“The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.”
“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future—
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”
“I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body.”
