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”
― Anna Kamienska

“Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.”
― Anna Kamienska

“I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.”
― 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

“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, Astonishments: Selected Poems

“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, Astonishments: Selected Poems

“Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.”
― 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 returned
to confirm
there can be no return.”
― Anna Kamienska

“Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.”
― Anna Kamienska