Anna Kamienska Quotes

This morning I suddenly catch myself: I'm not there, I'm so lost in thought, I don't know what's going on around me. Can you think yourself to death?

Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell's wall. To write like that.

Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

No home anymore. Nowhere to return. My house is a ruin, a cemetery. You may yearn for the grave, but just try living there.

I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
- From A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown.

Tell me what's the difference

Can you think yourself to death?

I'm moved by everything broken and crippled. Since that's how we really are.

I returned
to confirm
there can be no return.

I don't write poetry when I wish, I write when I can't, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.

Even a painful longing is some form of presence.

I have hands full of this radiance. It flows through my fingers. It doesn't diminish.

To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes.

We create eternity out of crumbs of time.

I am that which lies beyond time. Like a melody, which sounds completely only after the last note is played.

My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.

There are things better left untouched by words ...

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

I have no talent. I write poems for myself, to think things through, that's all.