Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
CZESLAW MILOSZI think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols.
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A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples, And grow a fair amount of nettles.
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Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.
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The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
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Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need.
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It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
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Do you know how it is when one wakes at night suddenly and asks, listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want, insatiable?
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Irony is the glory of slaves.
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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
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It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.
CZESLAW MILOSZ