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I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Czeslaw Milosz

I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Friendship Myself Time
Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Finding Growth Reality Small Travel Tree Truth
You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Failure Myself Reach Try
What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Achievement Allow Finish Oneself Reality Settle Thinking
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Belief Betrayal Death Judgement People Theory Thinking True
A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Hospital Human Walk Weakness Winter
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Date Death Feeling Poet Remember Safety Writing Yourself
And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Branch Each Other Follow Line World
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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Break Death Kind Life Moments Partition Separate Vision
Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Expression Form Generation Himself Inheritance Poet
Irony is the glory of slaves.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Glory Irony One Liner Slave
The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Better History Inspirational Passion Reason Voice
Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Attribute Description Desire Eyes Himself See
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

History Myself Stupidity Volume
The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Live Speak Story Talk Tribute
Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

Acceptance Defect Endurance Human Introduction Material Oneself Passive

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

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I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

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Popular Authors

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