67 Quotes by Paul Celan

We are told that when Hölderlin went 'mad,' he constantly repeated, 'Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me.'

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.

Death is a master from Germany.

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?

A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing--, the no one's rose.

They've healed me to pieces.

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

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.

They’ve healed me to pieces.