Anna Akhmatova

“I don't have a past. It's been erased. All I have is the present, and that is terrifying.”

“In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad.”

“I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God.”

“My shadow is on your wall, my anguish is in my tale.”

“Why is this age worse than all the previous ages?”

“The last freedom is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

“As if on a conveyer belt, I have been moving into the moving graveyard of my friends.”

“And I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.”

“A land not mine, still forever memorable, the waters of its ocean chill and fresh.”