Paul Celan Quotes

No fruit on earth can rival the cemetery's crop

He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.

After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by the perfumes of the flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

I guess I just like the idea of digging things up. Although I used to be scared of human skeletons.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

Underground. Which I hate. Like mines and tunnels and 13. Underground, where I dread dying, which is stupid because even if I die aboveground, the next thing they'll do is bury me underground anyway.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Stone, steel, dominions pass, Faith too, no wonder; So leave alone the grass That I am under.

Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last.

Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie

The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.

Through the window I can see Rooks above the cherry-tree, Sparrows in the violet bed, Bramble-bush and bumble-bee, And old red bracken smoulders still Among boulders on the hill, Far too bright to seem quite dead. But old Death, who can't forget, Waits his time and watches yet, Waits and watches by the door.

Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee, At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried, That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches.

No matter who you are, you will be put abed at last with a shovel.

Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

All our pompe the earth covers.

Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the whole substantial thing.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?