Marina Tsvetaeva Quotes

Marina Tsvetaeva speaks in a grand, reflective voice on freedom and books that feels like a quiet fire.

16 quotes

1. 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.

2. Freedom! A wanton slut on a profligate's breast!

3. 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?

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

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

6. 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?

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

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

9. In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.

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

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

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

13. 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.

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

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

16. 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.