Quotes from Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

I drink from a small spring, my thirst exceeds the ocean.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

But where do we find what's lasting? Where do the deathless things hide?

Music heard with you at home or in the car or even while strolling didn't always sound as pristine as piano tuners might wish— it was sometimes mixed with voices full of fear and pain, and then that music was more than music, it was our living and our dying.

In my defense I have only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale among the branches. You forgive it, its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen after another, drops of eternity, grams of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets

Time takes life away and gives us memory...

I could write a guidebook about this city, this fallen city. Street by street, house by house, church by church. What happened in this building, who was betrayed, and by whom, in this apartment, who waited for whom on this street corner. And why the person never came.

Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces.

Everything's finished. Riders gallop black horses, a tyrant composes a sentence of death with grammatical errors. Youth dissolves in a day; girls' faces freeze into medallions, despair turns to rapture and the hard fruits of stars in the sky ripen like grapes, and beauty endures, shaken, unperturbed, and God is and God dies; night returns to us in the evening, and the dawn is hoary with dew.

In the gray Poland plundered by the Soviet utopia there was no shortage of cunning petty demons on the party payroll out searching for young souls with ballistic tendencies, souls who dreamed of greatness and despised the trifling daily round of worries and pursuits.

Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe - since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there's also no shortage of terror.

Con qué tranquilidad avanzamos a través de días y meses, y cantamos en voz baja una negra canción de cuna, cuán fácil los lobos secuestran a nuestros hermanos con qué levedad respira la muerte

Time takes life away and gives us memory, gold with flame, black with embers.