Anna Akhmatova Quotes

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

I can see myself before myself - a being through dark scenery.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

Looking in the mirror, staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

I know myself a Man-- Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, something's not accurate?

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

No matter where you go, you always see yourself in the rearview mirror.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

Do you even know who the enemy is?" "I think... it's me".

Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.

You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

You get tangled up in your own ego of how you're perceived. You can lose your way.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

I knew from a very young age that there was something very wrong with me.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

I'll be me, but I don't like it.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?