Anna Kamienska Quotes

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

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?

Even a painful longing is some form of presence.

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

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.

I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.

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.

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

There are things better left untouched by words.

I returned to confirm there can be no return.

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

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

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

The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

Tell me what's the difference

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.