"jeśli zechcesz odejść ode mnie... nie zapominaj o uśmiechu możesz zapomnieć kapelusza rękawiczek notesu z ważnymi adresami czegokolwiek wreszczie -- po co musiałbyś wrócić wracając niespodzianie zobaczysz mnie w łzach i nie odejdziesz jeśli zechcesz pozostać nie zapominaj o uśmiechu wolno ci nie pamiętać daty moich urodzin ani miejsca naszego pierwszego pocałunku ani powodu naszej pierwszej sprzeczki jeśli jednak chcesz zostać nie czyń tego z westchnieniem ale z uśmiechem zostań"

"There live Christ and Nero in our hearts."

"People souls — perennial loners. They're loners like stray stars."

"How many times have I created to destroy?"

"Dead is the cradle of everything."

"Dead is the travel of all our travels."

"I loved life too much to lust for life."

"All our blasphemies are only little prayers."

"Be — fight — feel the pain — and love the wounds!"

"We pray to the grave, nothingness and plague."

"I was at god's order To looking for you in every woman's eye."

"I shake my memory. Maybe something in its branches that has been asleep for years will start up with a flutter.No. Clearly I'm asking too much. Nothing less than one whole second."

"They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone. They don't have to be seen while sailing on."

"I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds — a split second's enough for them to start being something else. Their trademark: they don't repeat a single shape, shade, pose, arrangement."

"The counting of weekdays would inevitably seem to be a senseless activity; dropping letters in the mailbox a whim of foolish youth; the sign "No Walking On The Grass" a symptom of lunacy."

"For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls."

"We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself."

"Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan. I'm drowning in debts up to my ears. I'll have to pay for myself with my self, give up my life for my life."

"If there are angels they must, I hope, find this convincing, this merriment dangling from terror, not even crying Save me Save me since all of this takes place in silence."

"Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared."

"Those who knew what this was all about must make way for those who know little. And less than that. And at last nothing less than nothing."

"After every war someone has to tidy up. Things won't pick themselves up, after all.Someone has to shove the rubble to the roadsides so the carts loaded with corpses can get by."

"It's shocking, the positions, the unchecked simplicity with which one mind contrives to fertilize another! Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know."

"There's nothing more debauched than thinking."

"God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men."

"And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!"

"Few of them made it to thirty. Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees. Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow. One had to hurry, to get on with life before the sun went down, before the first snow."

"He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time. All that was to pass passed in this house. Not in housing projects, not in furnished but empty quarters, among unknown neighbors on fifteenth floors that student field trips rarely reach."

"There's no life that couldn't be immortal if only for a moment.Death always arrives by that very moment too late.In vain it tugs at the knob of the invisible door. As far as you've come can't be undone."

"The window has a wonderful view of a lake, but the view doesn't view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless."

"We call it a grain of sand but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect or apt."

"Show me your little poem and I'll tell you why it wasn't written any earlier or later than it was.Oh no, you've got me wrong. Keep your funny piece of paper with its scribbles. All I need for my ends is your layer of dirt and the long gone smell of burning."

"Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light."

"Millennia have passed since you first called me archaeology. I no longer require your stone gods, your ruins with legible inscriptions. Show me your whatever and I'll tell you who you were."

"On this third planet from the sun among the signs of bestiality a clear conscience is Number One."

"The going's rough, and so we need the laugh of bright incisors, molars of goodwill. Our times are still not safe and sane enough for faces to show ordinary sorrow."

"I felt age within me. Distance. The futility of wandering. Torpor. I looked back setting my bundle down. I looked back not knowing where to set my foot. Serpents appeared on my path, spiders, field mice, baby vultures. They were neither good nor evil now — every living thing was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic."

"And how can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting! And dust blowing all over the steppes as if they hadn't been partitioned! And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves, that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters! Only what is human can truly be foreign."

"My dreams — even they're not as populous as they should be. They hold more solitude than noisy crowds."

"My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses."

"I know I won't be justified as long as I live, since I myself stand in my own way. Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, then labor heavily so that they may seem light."

"My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs. My apologies to great questions for small answers."

"Gone, lost, scattered to the four winds. It still surprises me how little now remains, one first person sing., temporarily declined in human form, just now making such a fuss about a blue umbrella left yesterday on a bus."

"My siblings died the day I left for dry land and only one small bone recalls that anniversary in me."

"Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life."

"Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.""

"I lost a few goddesses while moving south to north and also some gods while moving east to west."

"I believe in the refusal to take part. I believe in the ruined career. I believe in the wasted years of work. I believe in the secret taken to the grave."