Literary Birthday – 30 June – Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz was born 30 June 1911, and died 14 August 2004.

‘In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.’

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.