إنني أعاني مثل اسفنجة تعجز عن الامتلاء بالماء، مثل نهراً يعاني لأن انعكاسات الغيوم والشجر : ليست بغيمٍ ولا شجـر . - Czesław Miłosz

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.

During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.