Czeslaw Milosz: Trending quotes (page 4)

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Czeslaw Milosz: 212   quotes 4   likes

“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 Milosz
Fear , Hope

“Irony is the glory of slaves.”

Czeslaw Milosz

“Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Magic Mountain" (1975), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

“How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt
Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt
Real people, you who, in eternity, sing
The hours, sun in your hair appearing
And disappearing? How is that your breasts
Are pierced by shrapnel, and the oak groves burn,
While you, charmed, caring not at all, turn
To run through forests of machinery and concrete
And haunt us with the echoes of your feet?”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Book in the Ruins" (1941)
Rescue (1945)

People , Appearance , Singing , Sun

“And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,
My face covered with a coat though now no one was left
Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid,
My shames not eternal, base deeds to be forgiven.
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"And the City Stood in Its Brightness" (1963), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“I swear, there is in me no wizardry of word.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.”

Czeslaw Milosz

Przysięgam, nie ma we mnie czarodziejstwa słów.
Mówię do ciebie milcząc, jak obłok czy drzewo.
"Dedication" (1945); quoted in Conversant Essays : Contemporary Poets on Poetry (1990) edited by James McCorkle, p. 69

Tree , Silence

“And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Song On the End of the World"

Disappointment

“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

"Meaning" (1991)

World , Sense , Night

“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

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Thinking , Reality

“Long into the night we were walking on the Piazza del Duomo.
He: That I was too politicized.
And I answered him more or less as follows:If you have a nail in your shoe, what then?
Do you love that nail? Same with me.
I am for the moon amid the vineyards
When you see high up the snow on the Alps.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"In Milan" (1955), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
King Popeil and Other Poems (1962)

Love , Shoe , Night

“And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical,
Newtonian? A frozen prison?
Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation
Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend
I know. I don't know, and if I did,
Still my imagination is a thousand years old.”

Czeslaw Milosz

" An Appeal" (1954)
From the Rising of the Sun (1974)

Imagination

“I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics
for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me.
The word and the thought are over.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"They Will Place There Telescreens" (1964), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

“You are a tongue of the debased,
of the unreasonable, hating themselves
even more than they hate other nations,
a tongue of informers,
a tongue of the confused,
ill with their own innocence.But without you, who am I?
Only a scholar in a distant country,
a success, without fears and humiliations.
Yes, who am I without you?
Just a philosopher, like everyone else.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"My Faithful Mother Tongue" (1968), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Pinsky
City Without a Name (1969)

Hate , Fear , Distant , Success

“I will neither resurrect the past nor return.
Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.
I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.
Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,
its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl
nest on the dead ogive.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Farewell" (1945), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Rescue (1945)

Cats , Sleep , Past , Dead

“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.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"1945" (1985), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
New Poems (1985-1987)

Family , Christmas

“Earth, what have I to do with thee?
With your meadows where dumb beasts
Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads?
What have I to do with your implacable births?
So why this gracious melancholia?
Is it because anger is no use?”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Portal" (1976), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Birth , Anger

“Wherever he steps, there always
Endures traced in sand
A large-toed footprint
Which clamors to be tried out
By his childish foot arriving
From the virgin forests.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"Birth" (1947)
Daylight (1953)

“For a country without a past is nothing, a word
That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning,
A perishable wall destroyed by flame,
An echo of animal emotions.”

Czeslaw Milosz

"A Legend" (1949), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Hass
Daylight (1953)

Past , Animals , Country

“It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.”

Czeslaw Milosz book The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind (1953)

People , Communication