Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Marina Tsvetaeva

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.

Russian - Poet | October 8, 1892 - August 31, 1941

Source: Wikipedia

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

Marina Tsvetaeva

My desk, most loyal friend thank you. You've been with me on every road I've taken. My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.

Marina Tsvetaeva

After a sleepless night the body gets weaker, It becomes dear and not yours - and nobody's. Just like a seraph you smile to people And arrows moan in the slow arteries. After a sleepless night the arms get weaker And deeply equal to you are the friend and foe. Smells like Florence in the frost, and in each Sudden sound is the whole rainbow. Tenderly light the lips, and the shadow's golden Near the sunken eyes. Here the night has sparked This brilliant likeness - and from the dark night Only just one thing - the eyes - are growing dark.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.? In the cradle a child is screaming.? An old man sits over his death, and anyone? young enough talks to his love, breathes ?into her lips, looks into her eyes.

Marina Tsvetaeva

I am a moonbeam, free to go whenever I choose.

Marina Tsvetaeva

An amazing observation: it is precisely for feelings that one needs time, not for thought. ... Feelings, obviously, are more demanding than thought.

Marina Tsvetaeva

No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Marina Tsvetaeva

Think about me lightly, think of me, and forget.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Don't you know no one can escape the power of creatures reaching out with breath alone?

Marina Tsvetaeva

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Meanings are translatable. Words are untranslatable… More briefly – a word is translatable, its sound is not.

Marina Tsvetaeva

My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.

Marina Tsvetaeva

In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

Marina Tsvetaeva

I am a shadow’s shade, a lunatic, perhaps, Of two dark moons.

Marina Tsvetaeva

How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.

Marina Tsvetaeva

What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a world where the deepest black is grey, and inspiration is kept in a thermos? with all this immensity in a measured world?

Marina Tsvetaeva

The one that burned the hottest is the first to die.

Marina Tsvetaeva

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we who never let each other sleep above it.

Marina Tsvetaeva

However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.

Marina Tsvetaeva

My favorite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see in a dream. My second favorite is correspondence.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one's back they are a heavy weight.

Marina Tsvetaeva

What is this gypsy passion for separation, this readiness to rush off when we've just met? My head rests in my hands as I realize, looking into the night that no one turning over our letters has yet understood how completely and how deeply faithless we are, which is to say: how true we are to ourselves.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Women talk about love and silent about lovers, men - on the contrary: Speaking of mistresses, but are silent about love.

Marina Tsvetaeva

What is the main thing in love? to know and to hide. To know about the one you love and to hide that you love. At times the hiding (shame) overpowers the knowing (passion). The passion for the hidden - the passion for the revealed.

Marina Tsvetaeva

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

Marina Tsvetaeva

I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry.

Marina Tsvetaeva

I refuse to be. In the madhouse of the inhuman I refuse to live. With the wolves of the market place I refuse to howl.

Marina Tsvetaeva