Quote

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.

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
Come
Birds
Would
Graves
Millet
Seeds
Poppy
Bird
Poppies
Lived
Disguised
Dead
Pour
Used
Visit
Book
Feed

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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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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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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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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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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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I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.
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We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I know no one worth my envying him.
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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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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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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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What has no shadow has no strength to live.
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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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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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When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.
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