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

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I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
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Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
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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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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
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If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?
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The true enemy of man is generalization.
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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
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It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.
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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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The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
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When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.
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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.
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Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
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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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All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.
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You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail.
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Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
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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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