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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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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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It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
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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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At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.
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The soul exceeds its circumstances.
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What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
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A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
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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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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.
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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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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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The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
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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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The child who dwells inside us trusts that there are wise men somewhere who know the truth.
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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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