Paul Celan Quotes & Sayings

The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher's Stone. — Paul Celan

They've healed me to pieces. — Paul Celan

Autunm eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.
In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.
My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.
We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from
the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.
It is time. — Paul Celan

Go blind now, today:
eternity also is full of eyes -
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of the words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness. — Paul Celan

water needles
stitch up the split
shadow-he fights his way
deeper down, free. — Paul Celan

Poetry is a sort of homecoming. — Paul Celan

The sea,
tasted, drunk away, dreamed away. An hour
soul-eclipsed. The next, an autumn light,
offered up to a blind
feeling which came that way. Others, many,
with no place but their own heavy centres: glimpsed and avoided.
Foundlings, stars,
black, full of language: named
after an oath which silence annulled. — Paul Celan

There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German. — Paul Celan

To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.
To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you alone.
With all there is room for in that,
even without
language. — Paul Celan

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. — Paul Celan

And the too much of my speaking:
heaped up round the little
crystal dressed in the style of your silence. — Paul Celan

you're rowing by wordlight — Paul Celan

Speak you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.

Speak-
But don't split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
Give it the shadow.

Give it shadow enough,
Give it as much
As you know is spread round you from
Midnight to midday and midnight.

Look around:
See how things all come alive-
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.

But now the place shrinks, where you stand:
Where now, shadow-stripped, where?
Climb. Grope upwards.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!
Finer: a thread
The star wants to descend on:
So as to swim down beliow, down here
Where it sees itself shimmer:in the swell
Of wandering words. — Paul Celan

The two
heart-grey puddles:
two
mouthsfull of silence. — Paul Celan

Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route - also the route of art - for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the automatons, seem to lie in one direction - perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange, perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa's head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down - for this single short moment? Perhaps here, with the I - with the estranged I set free here and in this manner - perhaps here a further Other is set free? Perhaps the poem is itself because of this ... and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes, thus also the routes of art - time and again? Perhaps. — Paul Celan

There was earth inside them, and they dug. — Paul Celan

Spring: trees flying up to their birds — Paul Celan

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this. — Paul Celan

Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way - the way of art - for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction - is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa's head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free? — Paul Celan

DUMB AUTUMN SMELLS. The
marguerite, unbroken, passed
between home and chasm through
your memory.
A strange lostness was
palpably present, almost
you would have lived. — Paul Celan

who
is invisible enough
to see you — Paul Celan

Death is a master from Germany. — Paul Celan

Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won. — Paul Celan

Sand from the Urns
Green as mould is the house of oblivion.
Before each of the blowing gates your beheaded minstrel turns blue.
For you he beats his drum made of moss and of harsh
pubic hair;
With a festering toe in the sand he traces your eyebrow.
Longer he draws it than ever it was, and the red of your
lip.
You fill up the urns here and nourish your heart. — Paul Celan

Count up the almonds, Count what was bitter and kept you waking, Count me in too: I sought your eye when you glanced up and no one would see you, I spun that secret thread Where the dew you mused on Slid down to pitchers Tended by a word that reached no one's heart. There you first fully entered the name that is yours, you stepped to yourself on steady feet, the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence, things overheard thrust through to you, what's dead put it's arm around you too, and the three of you walked through the evening. Render me bitter. Number me among the almonds — Paul Celan

In the air, there your root remains, there, in the air — Paul Celan

He speaks truly who speaks the shade. — Paul Celan

I went with my very being toward language. — Paul Celan

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter? — Paul Celan

How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you're there, with a splinter of life. — Paul Celan

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking. — Paul Celan

Rush of pine scent (once upon a time),
the unlicensed conviction
there ought to be another way
of saying
this. — Paul Celan

Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won. — Paul Celan

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. — Paul Celan

Read! Read all the time, the understanding will come by itself. — Paul Celan

Don't sign your name
between worlds,
surmount
the manifold of meanings,
trust the tearstain,
learn to live. — Paul Celan

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem. — Paul Celan

The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere. — Paul Celan

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown. — Paul Celan

spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower — Paul Celan

Out of a shardstrewn
madness
I stand up
and look upon my hand,
how it draws the one
and only
circle — Paul Celan

Your song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
Eepinow,
E-i-o. — Paul Celan

With a changing key,
you unlock the house where
the snow of what's silenced drifts.
Just like the blood that bursts from
Your eye or mouth or ear,
so your key changes.
Changing your key changes the word
That may drift with flakes.
Just like the wind that rebuffs you,
Clenched round your word is the snow. — Paul Celan

With wine and being lost, with less and less of both: I rode through the snow, do you read me I rode God far
I rode God near, he sang, it was our last ride over the hurdled humans. They cowered when they heard us overhead, they wrote, they lied our neighing into one of their image-ridden languages. — Paul Celan

no one
bears witness for the
witness — Paul Celan

Between always and never — Paul Celan

Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle — Paul Celan

Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You , clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever. — Paul Celan