Marina Tsvetaeva Quotes

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

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.

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?

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

How quiet the writing, how noisy the printing.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.