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Quotes by Polish Authors
"Social democracy... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh."
"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm - all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
"Adjust your makeup to the light in which your wear it."
"This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father."
"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
"All the American women had purple noses and gray lips and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder. I recognized that the United States could be my life's work."
"Daylight reveals color; artificial light drains it."
"Whether you are sixteen or over sixty, remember, understatement is the rule of a fine makeup artist."
"O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle."
"Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal."
"Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall."
"There too he had been treated with revolting injustice. His struggles, his privations,his hard work to raise himself in the social scale, hadfilled him with such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice- the standard of that notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual. The Professor had genius, but lacked the great social virtue of resignation."
"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
"Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation."
"A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person - this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest?"
"It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice."
"In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night."
"The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness."
"Facing it-always facing it-that's the way to get through. Face it!"
"Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view."
"People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet."
"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets."
"It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task."
"This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still."
"Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters."
"The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims."
"There is a weird power in a spoken word."
"The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast."
"Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him."
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