Anna Kamienska Quotes

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

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?

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

The immense light. A state of inner emergency and waiting ... This luminosity does not negate reason or any rational sense. It simply exists. A kind of poetic sensibility open to the world. To everything
grand and small.

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

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

Tell me what's the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn't know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope

Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving.

Tell me what's the difference

I returned
to confirm
there can be no return.

Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.

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

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

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

We create eternity out of crumbs of time.

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

Even a painful longing is some form of presence.

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

During the sleepless hours of the night
a thought came to me that seemed important. I got up in the dark and wrote it down. In the morning I read: 'I went looking for loneliness. But it found me.