Czeslaw Milosz

“Irony is the glory of slaves.”

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

“The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”

“The survivors ran through the fields, escapingFrom themselves, knowing they wouldn't returnFor a hundred years. Before them were spreadThose quicksands where a tree changes into nothing,Into an anti-tree, where no borderlineSeparates a shape from a shape, and where,Amid thunder, the golden house of isCollapses, and the word becoming ascends.”

“What is poetry which does not save nations or people?”

“The purpose of poetry is to remind ushow difficult it is to remain just one person,for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

“The worst possible sexual education: a taboo imposed by the Catholic church plus romantic literature elevating love to unreal heights plus the obscene language of my peers. After all, I was nearly born in the nineteenth century, and I have no tender feelings for it.”

“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.”

“Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “cristallisation,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.”

“Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.”

“Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.”

“Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.”

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...”

“It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends”

“I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.”

“What has no shadow has no strength to live.”

“You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!”

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”

“I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise.Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound. When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.”

“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.”

“Human reason is beautiful and invincible.No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.It puts what should be above things as they are.It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.”

“Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.”

“And Yet the BooksAnd yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,That appeared once, still wetAs shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,And, touched, coddled, began to liveIn spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,Tribes on the march, planets in motion.“We are,” they said, even as their pagesWere being torn out, or a buzzing flameLicked away their letters. So much more durableThan we are, whose frail warmthCools down with memory, disperses, perishes.I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,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.”