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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.

Czeslaw Milosz

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Czeslaw Milosz
Age: 93 †
Born: 1911
Born: June 30
Died: 2004
Died: August 14
Diplomat
Essayist
Pedagogue
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Clarksburg
West Virginia
Miłosz
Czelaw Milosz
Fail
Matters
Reach
Failing
Words
Matter
Trying

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Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams.
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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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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.
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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
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On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
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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.
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Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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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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.
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All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.
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Language is the only homeland.
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A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter.
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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.
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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.
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.
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