Nâzım Hikmet Quotes

Today is Sunday. For the first time they took me out into the sun today. And for the first time in my life I was aghast that the sky is so far away and so blue and so vast I stood there without a motion. Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion leaning against the white wall. Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now. The soil, the sun and me... I feel joyful and how.

At eighteen you don't think about memories, you tell them.

Don’t live in the world as if you were renting
Or here only for the summer,
But act as if it were your father’s house.
Believe in seeds, earth, the sea
But people above all.
Grieve for the withering branch,
The dying star,
And the hurt animal.
But feel for people above all.
Rejoice in all the earth’s blessings –
Darkness and light,
The four seasons,
But people above all.

You're my bondage and my freedom, my flesh burning like a naked summer night, you're my country. Hazel eyes marbled green, you're awesome, beautiful, and brave, you're my desire always just out of reach.

At eighteen you sleep without memories.

Welcome baby, It's your turn to live, They lie in wait for you, chicken pox, whooping cough, smallpox, Malaria, TB, heart disease, cancer, and so on. Unemployment, hunger, and so on. Train wrecks, bus accidents, plane crashes, work accidents, Earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on. Heartbreak, alcoholism, and so on. Nightsticks, prison doors, and so on. They lie in wait for you, the atom bomb, and so on. Welcome baby, It's your turn to live. They lie in wait for you, socialism, communism, and so on.

It's this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is not to surrender.

Separation isn't time or distance it's the bridge between us finer than silk thread sharper than swords

The strangest of our powers Is the courage to live Knowing that we will die, Knowing nothing more true.

You waste the attention of your eyes, the glittering labour of your hands, and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves of which you'll taste not a morsel; you are free to slave for others— you are free to make the rich richer. The moment you're born they plant around you mills that grind lies lies to last you a lifetime. You keep thinking in your great freedom a finger on your temple free to have a free conscience. Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape, your arms long, hanging, your saunter about in your great freedom: you're free with the freedom of being unemployed. You love your country as the nearest, most precious thing to you. But one day, for example, they may endorse it over to America, and you, too, with your great freedom— you have the freedom to become an air-base. You may proclaim that one must live not as a tool, a number or a link but as a human being— then at once they handcuff your wrists. You are free to be arrested, imprisoned and even hanged. There's neither an iron, wooden nor a tulle curtain in your life; there's no need to choose freedom: you are free. But this kind of freedom is a sad affair under the stars.

I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world...

I'm twenty-seven, she's seventeen. "Blind Cupid, lame Cupid, both blind and lame Cupid said, Love this girl,"

My country or the stars Or my youth, what's farthest?

Looking at this insolent earth, you hear the first battle cry of our species- trap it under a rock and together, screaming, attack and destroy it, as if killing a mammoth.

All I wrote about us is lies All I wrote about us is the truth