Tadeusz Quotes & Sayings

Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death. — Tadeusz Borowski

-I haven't been writing for years. I lost faith. it's not for me. Too many levels.
-What levels?
-All those levels of existence. us down here, and up there, high above us. the ceiling of the universe. I've chosen nothingness. — Tadeusz Konwicki

A man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions. He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words. — Tadeusz Borowski

I press my back against the wall and feel the pressure of it against my whole body. I want to feel enclosed again, protected, safe as I was in the village. I wrap the blanket tightly around me, and I try to comfort myself by thinking about Tadeusz, but the loneliness that has opened up inside me is bigger than one person can fill. — Brigid Pasulka

They mutilate they torment each other
with silences with words
as if they had another
life to live
they do so
as if they had forgotten
that their bodies
are inclined to death
that the insides of men
easily break down
ruthless with each other
they are weaker
than plants and animals
they can be killed by a word
by a smile by a look — Tadeusz Rozewicz

What a curious power words have. — Tadeusz Borowski

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. — Tadeusz Borowski

Can I be a modern girl, if I acknowledge such thoughts? I must be modern; I live now. But like everybody else, as Hollier says, I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me. If I could sort them and control them I might know better where I stand, but when I most want to be contemporary the Past keeps pushing in, and when I long for the Past (like when I wish Tadeusz had not died, and were with me now to guide and explain and help me to find where I belong in life) the Present cannot be pushed away. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand. — Robertson Davies

Character is a lack of doubt, character is stubbornly persevering in an intention no matter how senseless it is, character is a lack of imagination, character is inborn dullness, character is the misfortune of humanity. — Tadeusz Konwicki

I had met a girl by chance that I might just as well not have met. A girl with red hair supposedly inherited from her grandfather, a plump girl with fair skin, broad lips, one eye light green and the other blue-violet, a girl who sometimes went wall-eyed and weighed around fifty-eight kilograms. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and lime, phosphorus, iron, as well as traces of other chemicals. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and a few pinches of the elements from her fellow countryman Mendeleev's table. Ten buckets of water brought to life by the great force of evolution or by our provincial God. — Tadeusz Konwicki

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it. — Tadeusz Borowski

You are Tadeusz Radecki? I am in the right place?' 'I know who I am. What I want to know is who you are. — Val McDermid

Tell me about
your Italian journey
I am not ashamed
I wept in that country
beauty touched me
I was a child once more
in the womb of that country
I wept
I am not ashamed
I have tried to return to paradise — Tadeusz Rozewicz

My gray zone is starting to include poetry here white is not absolute white black is not absolute black the edges of these non-colors adjoin — Tadeusz Rozewicz

It is necessary to recover the primeval force of the shock taking place at the moment when opposite a man (the viewer) there stood for the first time a man (the actor) deceptively similar to us, yet at the same time infinitely foreign, beyond an impassable barrier. — Tadeusz Kantor

In today's ambiguous world, character means despotism, tyranny, absolute intolerance. At last it is time to admire a lack of character, inner weakness. Our epoch is that of noble doubts, blessed uncertainty, sacred hypersensitivity, divine wishy-washiness. — Tadeusz Konwicki

The world can't die. Many generations have thought the world was dying. But it was only their world which was dying. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Character has outlived its day. In ancient, primitive times, when biologically weak man struggled against omnipotent nature, character was useful, beneficial; with hideous labor it shoved the heavy stone of human impotence forward. We learned to praise ourselves, to admire character, to prostrate ourselves before it, make a fetish of it. But today no one has the courage to discredit character, although, psychologically speaking, it is now a throwback, simply reactionary. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Our contemporary poverty is as transparent as glass and as invisible as the air. Our poverty is kilometer-long lines, the constant elbowing, spiteful officials, trains late without reason, the water cut off by some disaster (...), the monotony of living without any hope whatsoever, the decaying historic cities, the provinces emptying the rivers poisoned. Our poverty is the grace of the totalitarian state by whose grace we live. — Tadeusz Konwicki

We are only bits of protein in a cruel universe of silica and fire. — Tadeusz Konwicki

I think that for those who have suffered unjustly, justice alone is not enough. They want the guilty to suffer unjustly too. Only this will they understand as justice. — Tadeusz Borowski

I am free. I am one of the few free people in this country of utterly transparent slavery. A slavery covered by a sloppy coat of contemporary varnish. I have fought a long and bloodless battle for this pitiable personal freedom. I fought for my freedom against the temptations, ambitions, and appetites witch drive everyone blindly on the slaughterhouse. To the so-called modern slaughterhouse for human dignity, honor, and for something else, too, which we forgot about a long time ago. — Tadeusz Konwicki

I risked my life to save lives. I'm not looking for glory. I just want people to know the truth about what happened. — Tadeusz Borowski

For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser's piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe may be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that, ultimately - perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years - it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound. — Tadeusz Borowski

She smelled like water that had been warmed by the sun, and she also had the sharp, enticing aroma of birch leaves. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth
that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves
that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night
so the rope, paper, knife. — Tadeusz Borowski

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat. — Tadeusz Borowski

And I think about my cell at the Pawiak prison. During the first week I felt I would not be able to endure a day without a book, without the circle of light under the parafin lamp in the evening, without a sheet of paper, without you ... — Tadeusz Borowski

The worse things are, the more they play philosopher. The more obvious the nonsense, the profounder their thoughts. The more lawlessness there is, the more laws. The more widespread the chaos, the more insistent their love of symmetry. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Dreams are debris from bad day. Dreams are poems by bad poets that never got written. — Tadeusz Konwicki

I am free, anonymous man. My flights and falls occurred while I was wearing a magical cap of of invisibility, my successes and sins sailed on in invisible corvettes, and films and books flew off into the abyss in invisible strongboxes. I am free, anonymous. — Tadeusz Konwicki

There are no good or evil people. There is only a great, unfathomable mob trampling itself underfoot. The life-giving sources of the old morality have dried up and vanished in the sands of oblivion. There's no other source to draw from, no place to refresh oneself. There is no example, no inspiration. It is night. A night of indifference, apathy, chaos. — Tadeusz Konwicki

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work, but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man nor in the morality of systems. [p. 168] — Tadeusz Borowski

Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature. — Tadeusz Konwicki

I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another - through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting. — Tadeusz Borowski

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be. — Tadeusz Pankiewicz

The world is ruled by power and power is obtained by money. — Tadeusz Borowski

This sky, Sid.It's the sky of the great epics.The great Polish epics. Of Pan Tadeusz — Esi Edugyan

Ever been in Jail?
No. But I'm often alone. — Tadeusz Konwicki