"La gente mangia carne e pensa: "Diventerò forte come un bue". Dimenticando che il bue mangia erba. Mangiarsi con gusto un animale è assassinio premeditato a scopo di libidine. Digerirlo, occultamento di cadavere."

"The nights are no longer warm,"

"The sea raises you to your feet. And dead calm. Strands of light hold your hand. Now you have left this shore. Now you are in the wind of an invisible sail."

"For the poet Aaro Hellaakoski there was 'negative fire' in the steely blue skies of winter."

"FOG: Fog covers this region. / Can you still hear my voice? / I don't understand trees. / They try to grab our hair. / A branch has fallen on you. I know that. / Could you look behind me: / is there a load / on my back, as well?"

"From his hole so wet and drenching"

"Lapissa kaikki kukkii nopeasti,"

"LAPIN KESÄ:"

"When the early morning sun"

"YLERMI: The church will fall down before / the mitten parts from the stone! / The walls will crumble before / the finger rots on the wall! / Before that, may a time come / too, another, harsher time / which will not bow down to death, / will not crawl off to Mana. // He spurred the horse, and the flames / engulfed his golden helmet. / The mitten's on the stone still."

"I sang to my dear dead mother"

"Hark! My ears are catching corncrake’s clicking,"

"Real winners do not compete."

"They speak their loud dialects, / Sicilians, Sardinians, / Calabrians, / they all have their own taverns. / At the other end of the alley, / on the other side / a quiet spot, / waiters and patrons at tables, / their faces, hairdos / out of Pompeii's frescoes. / Large eyes look at us, / the door does not open out, / it opens in."

"Two writers who have gone the furthest from their proletarian starting points are Hannu Salama and Samuli Paronen. In regard to both its structure and its perceptions, Salama's epic prose is unsurpassed. From the point of view of the lowest and poorest societal strata the very individualistic Paronen created a body of work that has proved to be remarkable, even as criticism of civilisation."

"LAPLAND SUMMER:"

"One a child, one old / almost half a century apart // both / need my hand in this city"

"Two there on the beach / as close together as nostrils. / Calm sea day."

"And what about the three-year-old on the beach, in the heather: / "What if I take away the water," sand, rock / "what if I take away the sand, the rock, / the ground, the air, what then, what?""

"Up down / on summer's lake / the flying ant / finds a wall in the air"

"THE DESCENT: Faster I travel into the cold of the mountain / than I return from it. / One can't see the sun. / Wait, I come closer / as beside me the frozen snow / dwindles."

"IN THE SUN: Sickle moon still there in daylight. // We long for things as they were. / We want them back, / our blue-black nights, and the stars."

"OPEN: Gnats, too, are partly / air / and the swarming of seagulls / at the wind's mercy / inchoate / I walk / in front and between myself / in, out / abrupt and weary, an old heavy gate / I beat my own lintel to pieces."

"I lower the bill of my cap stop looking / thoughts ready to go / sit in this train that's as long as the journey"

"Hunkered down out on the spacious ice / coat-hems touching the snow / she slaps her knees, tries to sweet-talk her dog / but it won't come, does not remember its name, / left it there, / she does not remember her own, either, / and here on the shore I keep shouting, in vain."

"Outbursts blossom in Lapland rapidly"

"When I hate so much / that my eyes no longer close, / when I love so much / that I move, eyes open / close, far, without effort / not naming the country, the wind's evil"

"Without moving anything / I want to see / the way this autumn / makes the birds move."

"In the restaurant, eyes / above a soup bowl's rim / Is it she? / Changes shape, is and is not. / Now she's spat out a bit of bone, / I don't think it's her, / I'm leaving, I'm done eating. / This is a long and mad journey: / I see her on the faces of others, my own."

"I was reading the Book of Job. / People I knew came and went, / I read their book, / the seasons turned away, / I had been reading for a long time. / I was quiet. Not a single leaf to be seen. / I looked up: it had gone dark on me, / that star / in the middle of the sentence: // Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

"Down the ages / they conduct their long monologue: / can'y you hear? / They hope for it from others, / wait for ones like themselves, / they were born that way. / And so has the world been arranged / that those others grow weary / and begin to take care of the chores."

"That this time would be another, / but it is, / it is about to go under, every moment. / Facts bleed their color, / see how they break up and dissolve, / their fabric does not last; / you do see, don't you? / Not even your disaster / deserves belief."

"Driving through rain with you, / in a sea of rain / I saw only the bridges, their railings, / the passing lanes, / when the earth rose into my eyes / I heard, I heard that I had loved."

"Stood there who knows how long looked / at the clouds the hedge / when someone came out of the door it was her daughter."

"When you grow to become visible in the world / and build a nest / above your head / there are times when you fly up there / and it is light and swims in the air"

"Name is a fence and within it you are nameless."

"One day I was in rather a fix, so I went out. I strolled along in the dazzling sunlight of early spring, lost in thought, seeing and hearing nothing, really ; forming no kind of picture of what was going on around me in the Saturday bustle of the country village. Nothing. Funny, it was so typical : one of those times when a writer feels stale, when his pen has been showing signs of going on of going on strike and will soon cease to obey him altogether. Driven by his restlessness, the writer goes away like a rat leaving a sinking ship..."

"The others got heart, I got the harp."

"BLUE CROSS: Lord, great are my woes, / greater are your deeds, / do not think of me, / remember the unbaptised! // The Lord heard the bright one's cry, / he gave a sign, changed the girl / to a blue cross-tree ..."

"TUURI: Let not evermore, / let the gods celebrate / with mortal people! / The gods have long festivals, / man's life is fleeting, / swift as a wheel's turn ..."

"Whose is the world? Whose is thought? His who loves them."

"Sometimes it is hard to avoid a certain feeling of sadness: when realizing that everything sensible has already, many times over, been excellently expressed—and expressed in vain. And note how well-hidden, pushed into obscurity, drowned by triviality's overwhelming mass—therefore, how important it is that the sensible be repeated again and again, experienced in new individuals over and over with new variations, with a new emphasis, in a new voice—continuously kept alive."

"What has been postponed by reason of road and effort is well postponed."

"Truth and beauty ... yield themselves only to whoever surrenders to them—as to a rescuer."

"The artist and the poet have the facility for mistaking pure languor for meditative peace and strength. True meditation "rests" in swiftness."

"Everything great has already been said. But the person who knows how to stimulate his soul with the magnificence of it is always something new."

"The egotism of wisdom: to burn all that is pettily, painfully, stupidly selfish in the fire of love of spiritual vision and freedom."

"The noble Nazarene ... who raged against "the world," against the philistinism, the halfheartedness, the lack of ideals—if he had guessed that he was forging a weapon for the hands of exactly "this world"—he who sensed the misfortune of humanity so deeply that he didn't find any other solution to its enigma than to entirely reject and turn his back on all that is earthly, would see his name dragged into the service of an intense philistine optimism."