Nazim Hikmet Quotes

• It's this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is not to surrender.
• You waste the attention of your eyes, the glittering labour of your hands, and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves of which you'll taste not a morsel; you are free to slave for others-- you are free to make the rich richer. The moment you're born they plant around you mills that grind lies lies to last you a lifetime. You keep thinking in your great freedom a finger on your temple free to have a free conscience. Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape, your arms long, hanging, your saunter about in your great freedom: you're free with the freedom of being unemployed. You love your country as the nearest, most precious thing to you. But one day, for example, they may endorse it over to America, and you, too, with your great freedom-- you have the freedom to become an air-base. You may proclaim that one must live not as a tool, a number or a link but as a human being-- then at once they handcuff your wrists. You are free to be arrested, imprisoned and even hanged. There's neither an iron, wooden nor a tulle curtain in your life; there's no need to choose freedom: you are free. But this kind of freedom is a sad affair under the stars.
• I'm twenty-seven, she's seventeen. 'Blind Cupid, lame Cupid, both blind and lame Cupid said, Love this girl,'
• I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world...
• My country or the stars Or my youth, what's farthest?
• The strangest of our powers Is the courage to live Knowing that we will die, Knowing nothing more true.
• Loneliness feels like prison.
• The world's not run by governments or money but people rule a hundred years from now maybe but it will be for sure.
• Separation isn't time or distance it's the bridge between us finer than silk thread sharper than swords
• Because of you, each day is a melon slice smelling sweetly of earth Because of you, all fruits reach out to me as if I were the sun. Thanks to you, I live on the honey of hope. You are the reason my heart beats. Because of you, even my loneliest nights smile like an Anatolian kilim on your wall. Should my journey end before I reach my city, I've rested in a rose garden thanks to you. Because of you I don't let death enter, clothed in the softest garments, and knocking on my door with songs calling me to the greatest place.
• All I wrote about us is lies All I wrote about us is the truth
• Welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you chicken pox whooping cough smallpox malaria TB heart disease cancer and so on unemployment hunger and so on train wrecks bus accidents plane crashes on-the-job injuries earthquakes floods droughts and so on heartbreak alcoholism and so on nightsticks prisons doors and so on they're laying for you the atom bomb and so on welcome baby it's your turn to live they're laying for you socialism communism and so on.
• You're my bondage and my freedom, my flesh burning like a naked summer night, you're my country. Hazel eyes marbled green, you're awesome, beautiful, and brave, you're my desire always just out of reach.
• Looking at this insolent earth, you hear the first battle cry of our species- trap it under a rock and together, screaming, attack and destroy it, as if killing a mammoth.
• At eighteen the heart shoots like a pebble from a slingshot and the head doesn't sit on the shoulder.
• At eighteen you sleep without memories.
• At eighteen you don't think about memories, you tell them.
• Today is Sunday. For the first time they took me out into the sun today. And for the first time in my life I was aghast that the sky is so far away           and so blue           and so vast               I stood there without a motion. Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion leaning against the white wall. Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now. The soil, the sun and me... I feel joyful and how.

nazim hikmet