Anna Kamienska Quotes & Sayings

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. — Anna Kamienska

Even a painful longing is some form of presence. — Anna Kamienska

To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes. — Anna Kamienska

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 — Anna Kamienska

No home anymore. Nowhere to return. My house is a ruin, a cemetery. You may yearn for the grave, but just try living there. — Anna Kamienska

I have hands full of this radiance. It flows through my fingers. It doesn't diminish. — Anna Kamienska

Where your pain is, there your heart lies also. — Anna Kamienska

Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. — Anna Kamienska

Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell's wall. To write like that. — Anna Kamienska

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

Can you think yourself to death? — Anna Kamienska

Tell me what's the difference — Anna Kamienska

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? — Anna Kamienska

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

The immense light. A state of inner emergency and waiting ... This luminosity does not negate reason or any rational sense. It simply exists. A kind of poetic sensibility open to the world. To everything
grand and small. — Anna Kamienska

I have no talent. I write poems for myself, to think things through, that's all. — Anna Kamienska

Poetry is a presentiment of the truth. — Anna Kamienska

I'm moved by everything broken and crippled. Since that's how we really are. — Anna Kamienska

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself. — Anna Kamienska

Lack of Faith"

Yes,
even when I don't believe -
there is a place in me
inaccessible to unbelief,
a patch of wild grace,
a stubborn preserve,
impenetrable,
pain untouched by the sleeping body,
music that builds its nest in silence. — Anna Kamienska

During the sleepless hours of the night
a thought came to me that seemed important. I got up in the dark and wrote it down. In the morning I read: 'I went looking for loneliness. But it found me. — Anna Kamienska

I don't write poetry when I wish, I write when I can't, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut. — Anna Kamienska

I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
- From A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook — Anna Kamienska

There are things better left untouched by words ... — Anna Kamienska

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. — Anna Kamienska

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. — Anna Kamienska

We create eternity out of crumbs of time. — Anna Kamienska

I returned
to confirm
there can be no return. — Anna Kamienska