Quotes from Ilya Kaminsky

Be courageous, we say, but no one is courageous, as a sound we do not hear lifts the birds off the water.

I am your boy drowning in this country, who doesn't know the word for drowning and yells I am diving for the last time!

Yes we lived. We lived, yes, don't say it was a dream/

A man should smell better than his country

You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens.

In these avenues, deafness is our only barricade.

Deafness isn't an illness! It's a sexual position!

Time, my twin, take me by the hand through the streets of your city; my days, your pigeons, are fighting for crumbs—

There are two kinds of obscurity; one arises from a lack of feelings and thoughts, which have been replaced by words; the other from an abundance of feelings and thoughts, and the inadequacy of words to express them.