Adam Zagajewski

"You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns."

"Our life is ordinary, I read in a crumpled paper abandoned on a bench. Our life is ordinary, the philosophers told me."

"December, herald of destruction, takes you on a long stroll through the black torsos of trees and leaves scorched in autumn’s fire,as if to say: so much then for your secrets and your treasures, the fervent trill of small birds, the promises of summer months."

"Don't allow the lucid moment to dissolve Let the radiant thought last in stillness though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers We haven't risen yet to the level of ourselves."

"Probably I am an ordinary middle-class believer in individual rights, the word "freedom" is simple to me, it doesn't mean the freedom of any class in particular."