Anna Akhmatova Quotes

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .

...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

I made my first investment at age eleven. I was wasting my life up until then.

You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.

What do you think? Who are these people who have depicted heaven as a playboy Club - who are these people? Starved, poor, who have missed their life - they are projecting their desires in heaven. In heaven there are rivers of wine... who are these people who are imagining rivers of wine? They must have missed here. And there are wish-fulfilling trees. You sit underneath them, desire, and the moment you desire, immediately it is fulfilled.

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.

You will miss out on some near soul mates. This goes for friendships, too. There will be unforgettable people with whom you have shared an excellent evening or a few days. Now they live in Hong Kong, and you will never see them again. That’s just how life is.

What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.

I'm more afraid of falling than I am of flying high. I'm not as scared of dying as I am of growing old. Every battle has its glory and its consequence.

Denial is much more then an Egyptian River.

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.

By the age of three ... I was already an addicted reader. I still crave daily immersion in experience other than my own; (it needn't be more pleasant, exciting or illuminating -- merely other) and I still fall into books as though into catalepsy.

Time, as a river, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial, while things more solid and substantial have been immersed.

When men once reach their autumn, sickly joys fall off apace, as yellow leaves from trees

Small streams don't plan to be mighty rivers. We just move in a direction; God decides what He'll have us become.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it, naming himself that, or maybe some other persons thought of it and named that person. It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.

I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.

Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.