Quotes About Celan

#1. The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.

Edward Hirsch

#2. Rush of pine scent (once upon a time),
the unlicensed conviction
there ought to be another way
of saying
this.

Paul Celan

#3. Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.

Paul Celan

#4. Don't sign your name
between worlds,
surmount
the manifold of meanings,
trust the tearstain,
learn to live.

Paul Celan

#5. spills of mire I swallowed inside the tower

Paul Celan

#6. Your song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
Eepinow,
E-i-o.

Paul Celan

#7. Out of a shardstrewn
madness
I stand up
and look upon my hand,
how it draws the one
and only
circle

Paul Celan

#8. There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Paul Celan

#9. He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

Paul Celan

#10. They've healed me to pieces.

Paul Celan

#11. Death is a master from Germany.

Paul Celan

#12. Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

Paul Celan

#13. The two
heart-grey puddles:
two
mouthsfull of silence.

Paul Celan

#14. Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle

Paul Celan

#15. I went with my very being toward language.

Paul Celan

#16. Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Paul Celan

#17. And the too much of my speaking:
heaped up round the little
crystal dressed in the style of your silence.

Paul Celan

#18. How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you're there, with a splinter of life.

Paul Celan

#19. The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.

Paul Celan

#20. To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.
To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you alone.
With all there is room for in that,
even without
language.

Paul Celan

#21. who
is invisible enough
to see you

Paul Celan

#22. water needles
stitch up the split
shadow-he fights his way
deeper down, free.

Paul Celan

#23. Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You , clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever.

Paul Celan

#24. Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.

Paul Celan

#25. In the air, there your root remains, there, in the air

Paul Celan

#26. The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher's Stone.

Paul Celan

#27. no one
bears witness for the
witness

Paul Celan

#28. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

Paul Celan

#29. Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.

Paul Celan

#30. you're rowing by wordlight

Paul Celan

#31. They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

Paul Celan

#32. Read! Read all the time, the understanding will come by itself.

Paul Celan

#33. The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?

Paul Celan

#34. Spring: trees flying up to their birds

Paul Celan

#35. DUMB AUTUMN SMELLS. The
marguerite, unbroken, passed
between home and chasm through
your memory.
A strange lostness was
palpably present, almost
you would have lived.

Paul Celan

#36. Between always and never

Paul Celan

#37. There was earth inside them, and they dug.

Paul Celan