I stayed silent for many years.

Nothing came of it —

neither good,

nor evil.

- Ryszard Krynicki

Cats

Ryszard Krynicki

The Lord God got cats right—

Wisława Szymborska sometimes says.

Sometimes she adds: Only.

Sometimes: The best.

Silent, soaring,

early autumn light

glowed past the window.

I miss you.

- Ryszard Krynicki

In this country? Yes, I stayed in this country.

Exile comes in many shapes

and places.

- Ryszard Krynicki

Nothing, night beyond the glass

looks through me with the non-gaze

of the boy I was, am

not, won't be.

- Ryszard Krynicki

The seer and the visible reciprocate one another.

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

What we see only lives in our eyes by what looks at us.

The act of seeing attains its fullness only by opening itself in two.

- Georges Didi-Huberman

The world is not what I think, but what I live through.

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Respect is possible only where there is distance.

- Byung-Chul Han

With all its eyes, the creature-world beholds

the Open.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

- Iris Murdoch

The age of progress liberated demons

of which the Middle Ages

never dreamed...

- Ryszard Krynicki

Progress and doom are two sides of the same medal.
- Hannah Arendt

The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; 

it does not exclude, it exhausts.

- Byung-Chul Han

Beyond a certain point, tools turn from being means to ends.

- Ivan Illich