Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
This Cruel Age has deflected me.
My shadow serves as the friend I crave
All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
The secret of secrets is inside me again.
You do not know just what you've been forgiven.
It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.
It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.
Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.
Real tenderness can't be confused, It's quiet and can't be heard.
Rising from the past, my shadow Is running in silence to meet me.
That was when the ones who smiled Were the dead, glad to be at rest.
You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.
I have long had this premonition of a bright day and a deserted house
All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead.
If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.
We are all carousers and loose women here; How unhappy we are together!
Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.
Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.
There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.
If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.
The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.
I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.
Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.
I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.
The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.
Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.
Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.
We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.
I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.
No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot survivor of that time, that place.
And you know, I agree to everything: I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy, Darkness will be light and sin lovely.
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.
But Fear and the Muse in turn guard the place Where the banished poet has gone And the night that comes with quickened pace Is ignorant of dawn.
No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.
The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
A loss, but who still mourns the breath of one woman, or laments one wife? Though my heart never can forget, how, for one look, she gave up her life.
Song falls silent, music is dumb, But the air burns with their fragrance, And white winter, on its knees, Observes everything with reverent attention.
Forgive me, that I manage badly, Manage badly but live gloriously, That I leave traces of myself in my songs, That I appeared to you in waking dreams.
Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.
A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me.
Let whoever wants to, relax in the south, And bask in the garden of paradise. Here is the essence of northand it's autumn I've chosen as this year's friend.
Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed, His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared. His mother stood apart. No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.
Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.
I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.
... he is rewarded with a form of eternal childhood, with the bounty and vigilance of the stars, the whole world was his inheritance and he shared it with everyone.
Sweet to me was not the voice of man, But the wind's voice was understood by me. The burdocks and the nettles fed my soul, But I loved the silver willow best of all.