I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

I'm drowning in papers.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

Such certainty is beautiful but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Its just not easy to explain to someone else what you dont understand yourself.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One cant get lost here.

Angels are like diamonds. They can't be made, you have to find them. Each one is unique.

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.

You didn't hear the angels singing. It was brought down to Mother Earth, which is where it should be. And that led me to a lot of other reading.

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

I don't see how I possibly could have come from where I entered the planet to where I am now if there had not been angels along the way.

Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.

But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love; No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love; The years of Heaven with all earth's little pain Make Good Together there we can begin again, In babyhood.

An angel's arm can't snatch me from the grave; legions of angels can't confine me there.

If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, - Angels alone that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.

The righteousness of Jesus Christ is one of those great mysteries, which the angels desire to look into, and seems to be one of the first lessons that God taught men after the fall.

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

I like to refer to my years with the Angels as the foundation of my career.