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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Meanings are translatable. Words are untranslatable"¦ More briefly "“ a word is translatable, its sound is not.

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 ...