Shmuel Yosef Agnon

He longed for it to be winter. A cold wind would blow, the sea would pound, and he would rise cheerful and fit from a delicious sleep beneath warm blankets. Then would come days in which he would write his great novel. The kettle would boil and hot coffee would froth in his cup. In the garden the citron would flower beneath a brilliant moon, its branches dripping fragrance. The starry sky would sweeten the soft silence and Hemdat would pour the dew of his soul into the sea-blue night.

Zealots in the Land of Israel shriek that we ought to do unto Germany as it has done to us-- that, just as Germany has issued a ban on Jewish books, so should we ban all German books, without recognizing or realizing that whoever deprives himself of intellectual discourse jeopardizes his own soul.

In other countries, the bureaucracy serves the needs of the people and the state; here, the bureaucracy itself is primary, and it takes precedence over the needs of the people and the state.

I know my daughter that I do not give you wealth and assets, but I teach you what happen in books, while the world of a dark man for him reads the book and sees another world.

Nelly Sachs

World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire.

Always 
there where children die
stone and star
and so many dreams
become homeless.

We orphans
We lament to the world:
Stones have become our playthings,
Stones have faces, father and mother faces
They wilt not like flowers, nor bite like beasts--
And burn not like tinder when tossed into the oven--
We orphans we lament to the world:
World, why have you taken our soft mothers from us
And the fathers who say: My child, you are like me!
We orphans are like no one in the world any more!
O world
We accuse you!

We are so stricken
that we think we're dying
when the street casts an evil word at us.
The street does not know it,
but it cannot stand such a weight;
it is not used to seeing a Vesuvius of pain
break out.
Its memories of primeval times are obliterated,
since the light became artificial
and angels only play with birds and flowers
or smile in a child's dream

Miguel Ángel Asturias

Rise and demand; you are a burning flame.
You are sure to conquer there where the final horizon
Becomes a drop of blood, a drop of life,
Where you will carry the universe on your shoulders,
Where the universe will bear your hope.

In prison there's no bad, everything's worse. Worse bellyache, worse misery, worse sadness--the worst of the worst. Jailers and judges seem like people without reason, deranged. Compliance with rules and regulations which have nothing to do with reality turns them into madmen, at least they seem such to those not under the strange influence of the law.

However life treats you, as time goes by you always get the feeling you've lost life in the very living of it.

You might almost say that if it weren’t for me, Fortune wouldn’t exist, as I have even to take the part of the blind goddess in the lottery.

But, as I told you, nobody ever does a thing, and so naturally it is I, the President of the Republic, who has to do everything, and take all the blame as well. 

Heinrich Böll

Never have to try to repeat the moments, they should only remember them as they happened once.

There are people who are waiting for nothing.

I like them in a strange way, despite all the bitter experiences that I have left with my fellow men. I mean, humans. 

There is a temporary cure for it, it is alcohol, and there can be a permanent and permanent cure, and that is marry. Marie has left me. The clown that falls on the carnage will fall earlier than a drunk skylight. 

I do not trust Catholics, I said, "because they take advantage of you." 
And Protestants? He asked with a laugh. 
I loathe the way they fumble around their consciences. 
And are you? He was still laughing. 
They bore me because they all talk about is God.

An artist is like a woman who can do nothing but love, and who succumbs to every decoy male jackass.

No one in this world, because he is not in the position of a particular human being, can not feel right and correct about evil or good, now whether it is a matter of happiness or misery, or "arrogance" To be connected. The fact is that every man is always in a state outside of human condition and condition.

Patrick White

I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.

There's nothing so inhuman as a human being

Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest.

Harry Martinson

Attempts to rescue through thought escape
and over-gliding from dream to dream 
often became our method. 
With one leg drowned in the emotional area 
the other with his support in emotional death 
we often stood. 
I asked myself but forgot to answer. 
I dreamed a life but forgot to be. 
I traveled everything but forgot about danger - 
because I was a prisoner here in Aniara.

How hard to believe in life after that. 
How right to wish for life after that. 
It is to show joy in living 
and desire to return to its beauty.

I asked myself but forgot to answer. 
I dreamed a life but forgot to be. 
I traveled all around but forgot about danger - 
because I was a prisoner here in Aniara

How great is not space, 
how powerful its mystery, 
how small I am.

For her, Christmas was a woodcutting, a festive ok she wore because she didn't dare to do anything else, knew otherwise or had thought otherwise. Had she just dared, she would have shot off the children's begging and greedy gaze during the Christmas (in food and sausages drowned) star. Had she just dared to think, yes, then she had spit on Christmas, the women's special lunchtime. But she didn't dare.

Odysseus Elytis

But you must know that only he who fights the darkness within will the day after tomorrow have his own share in the sun.

You'll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth.

If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying eros, eros, eros.

Willing or not, we are all hostages of the joy of which we deprive ourselves. Here springs love’s pre-eternal sadness.

Poetry should express the apex, should constitute a kind of pioneering outpost in the unexplored area of life, should precede other arts in the depiction of sensitivity. It should be the word and sword intervening in the spirit, so that matter, docile, can follow. Creation, especially poetic, is above all a result.

In the final analysis, roses are nothing but tears. Nothing but the whistle of the leaving train and the breach of a promise. Sorrow, too, is nothing but an evening leaning on April.

Czesław Miłosz

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.

Learning
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Language is the only homeland.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, 
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Elias Canetti

Relearn astonishment.

All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.

Wole Soyinka

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

A tiger doesn't proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.

Romance is the sweetening of the soul
With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

The man dies in all those that keep silent.

Well, some people say I'm pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?

Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.

The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress truth.

Today, the constituency of fear has become much broader, far less selective.

If you believe in democracy, are you not thereby obliged to accept, without discrimination, the fall-outs that come with a democratic choice, even if this means the termination of the democratic process itself?