Paul Celan Quotes

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Hours later the blank sheet still stared at me, and I beat my fist against the desk in fury and fustration, striking it so hard my hand bled. That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.

The silence was killing me. And that's all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out.

And for all these people alike, the key to healing turned out to be the same. Each had a hurt he had to forgive.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

Swathed in silk, I feel like a caterpillar in a cocoon awaiting metamorphosis. I always supposed that to be a peaceful condition. At first it is. But as I journey into the night, I feel more and more trapped, suffocated by the slippery bindings, unable to emerge until I have transformed into something of beauty. I squirm, trying to shed my ruined body and unlock the secret to growing flawless wings. Despite enormous effort, I remain a hideous creature, fired into my current form by the blast from the bombs.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

Then I found it: the source of the blood, the place where he'd been shot. 'Total?' I said, and I got a slight whimper. 'You have a boo-boo on your tail.

This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

There were a thousand secrets in her eyes, a thousand wounds. A lifetime of distrust and betrayal. Isolation. How did one overcome such things?

We all know many people who have been through this reality, and how it changes them. This happens to be an area I know something about. It's a virus.

Let the blood and the bruises define your legacy.

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.

Violence up close has a smell. Like copper blood and charcoal burning.

Loss is loss. Doesn't take death to create it.

Earth helped him with the cry of blood.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Sometimes it's not bad to hurt. Sometimes you don't want things until you get hurt. We got hurt today, let's see what we do.

My background is full of pain. My mother was in a Nazi concentration camp and our whole family was killed off. Then early on your father leaves and all you've got is your mother, and I was an only child. Then you come to a new country and I can't speak English.

Enough of blood and tears. Enough!