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Quotes by Polish Authors
"If you compare my character to the others, they were sexy with designer clothes. I had the nerdy outfit."
"Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit."
"I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected."
"He killed his enemies because he was afraid they would kill him. Amin ordered entire tribes to be put to death, because he feared they would rebel."
"I don't fret over lost time - I can always use the situations in a novel."
"In Europe, there is no television filmmaking legislation that could assist film production because private broadcasters are not interested in supporting Polish film."
"I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces."
"No one could possibly look all the time like my photographs. It is dreadfully hard to live up to them. They stare at me everywhere."
"All that I can tell you is, that I used my humble powers to the uttermost, and raised my voice in behalf of Human Rights in general, and the elevation and Rights of Woman in particular, nearly all my life."
"Let me remind you that nuclear disarmament is not just an ardent desire of the people, as expressed in many resolutions of the United Nations. It is a legal commitment by the five official nuclear states, entered into when they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty."
"Let the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out."
"Never test another man by your own weakness."
"I look back into past history, the stored experiences or products of the imagination. I look no further forward than the evening."
"A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture."
"Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me."
"It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?"
"I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines."
"The extent of one man's guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured."
"Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore... prove ultimately futile."
"In the forty years of the people's republic, some of the worst historical traits were preserved in our people. These included even the common characteristics developed in the economic reality of the time of partitions in the 17th and 18th centuries."
"This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession."
"I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory."
"Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end."
"In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed."
"Well, I didn't want to have the reminder sort of in the sky, so that people would forever look at it. I wanted to have - really to create a city from the bottom up. From that foundation, which held, from the democratic power of what the site really is."
"It's a project that touched me as an immigrant and as a New Yorker."
"Indeed, the very first resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations - adopted unanimously - called for the elimination of nuclear weapons."
"At the same time, television theatre became more visibly active."
"The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author."
"She had her reward! - that reward of which no enemie could deprive her, which no slanders could make less precious - the eternal reward of knowing that she had done her duty."
"I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones."
"You know, this whole thing about Ricky Martin, and how successful that young man is. He's 27, I was 29."
"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."
"Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort."
"This homage has been rendered not to me - for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me - but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius."
"Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life."
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