He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
CZESLAW MILOSZIt’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.
More Czeslaw Milosz Quotes
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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.
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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.
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Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
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I am not my own friend.Time cuts me in two.
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.
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I 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.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends.
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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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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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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.
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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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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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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.
CZESLAW MILOSZ






