Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.

— Paul Celan

Paul Celan Quotes

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

— Paul Celan

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

— Paul Celan

There was earth inside them, and they dug.

— Paul Celan

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

Strong

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

— Paul Celan

I went with my very being toward language.

— Paul Celan

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

— Paul Celan

Spring: trees flying up to their birds.

— Paul Celan

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

He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

— Paul Celan

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.

— Paul Celan

The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.

— Paul Celan

Tall poplars – human beings of this earth!

— Paul Celan

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

— Paul Celan

Between always and never.

— Paul Celan

Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.

— Paul Celan

The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.

— Paul Celan

What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much made explicit?

— Paul Celan

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.

— Paul Celan

The world is gone, I have to carry you.

— Paul Celan

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