Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

I have been restless for as long as I can remember.

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

The fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world Have hung upon the beatings of my heart.

I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things.

I wanted to pray for an hour, but I keep thinking and thinking, and always sick thoughts, and my head aches - what is the use of praying? - it's only a sin! It is strange, too, that I am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. Men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. And so it must be, it si the law of nature, otherwise their strength would not hold out... I lay down on the sofa but I did not sleep...

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

An Irishman can be worried by the consciousness that there is nothing to worry about.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and raised my eyes to the sky, but even in the sky there seemed to be no tranquillity. Dotted with stars, it constantly quivered and danced and shivered.

No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

Not being able to sleep is terrible. You have the misery of having partied all night... Without the satisfaction.

I'm a really restless person; I'm tired of the way I sounded or looked yesterday. So it's hard to hang onto this image of me as this young Swedish female in this world.

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

Inside it drives me crazy, my insecurities could eat me alive.

I have moments that aren't too bad, but there's always something I'm struggling with, or feeling guilty about. I just figured I needed to try harder, but I find it difficult to sustain that motivation.

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

Maybe I was just one of those people who couldn't rest easy unless things went catastrophically wrong.

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.

I never felt at peace with anything or anybody.