“They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.”

"Dedication" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Rescue (1945)

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Czeslaw Milosz 106
Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator 1911–2004

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“At last, here is a new man [ Millet ], who has the knowledge which I would like to have, and movement, color, expression, too, - here is a painter!”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Quote of Diaz, 1844; as cited by fr:Alfred Sensier, in Jean-Francois Millet – Peasant and Painter, translated from the French original by Helena de Kay; publ. Macmillan and Co., London, 1881, p. 62
Diaz de la Peña gave this comment when he saw for the first time work of Millet: the painting 'The Riding Lessons' on the Paris' Salon of 1844
Quotes of Diaz

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“For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.”

Machado de Assis (1839–1908) Brazilian writer

Algum tempo hesitei se devia abrir estas memórias pelo princípio ou pelo fim, isto é, se poria em primeiro lugar o meu nascimento ou a minha morte. Suposto o uso vulgar seja começar pelo nascimento, duas considerações me levaram a adotar diferente método: a primeira é que eu não sou propriamente um autor defunto mas um defunto autor, para quem a campa foi outro berço; a segunda é que o escrito ficaria assim mais galante e mais novo. Moisés, que também contou a sua morte, não a pôs no intróito, mas no cabo: diferença radical entre este livro e o Pentateuco.
Source: As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Ch. 1 (opening words), p. 7.

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“But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.”

William Bradford (1590–1657) English Separatist leader in Leiden, Holland and in Plymouth Colony (1590-1657)

Ch. 4.

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