Literary Birthday – 30 June – Czesław Miłosz
Czesław Miłosz was born on 30 June 1911 and died on 14 August 2004.
‘In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.’
Czesław Miłosz Quotes
- Language is the only homeland.
- The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
- The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.
- Learning. To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labour for one human life.
- When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
Czesław Miłosz was a Polish poet, prose writer, and translator. He defected to the West in 1951. The Captive Mind is a classic of anti-Stalinism. Milosz became an American citizen and was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature with the reason: “who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts”.
Source for image: Artur Pawłowski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Czeslaw_Milosz_3_ap.tif
by Amanda Patterson
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Posted on: 30th June 2013
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