Anna Akhmatova Quotes

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

That you are not already golden word in our streets Already memories Your love fades Already Whether you are no longer to have perished.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.

The cancer of time is eating us away

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

Surely 't is better, when summer is over To die when all fair things are fading away.

Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

The past is a bucket of ashes

As I watched Bill, waiting with apparent calm for death to come to him, I had a flash of him as I'd known him: the first vampire I'd ever met, the first man I'd ever gone to bed with, the first suitor I'd ever loved. Everything that followed had tainted those memories, but for one moment I saw him clearly, and I loved him again.

Favour will as surely perish as life.

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

A box of new crayons! Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

All things must pass.

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

Time is the speed at which the past decays.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.