Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

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"After every war someone has to tidy up."

"All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses."

"All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look."

"All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination."

"Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life."

"Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!"

"Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person."

"Even the worst book can give us something to think about."

"Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through."

"Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke."

"Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me."

"I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again."

"I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible."

"I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom."

"I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here."

"I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit."

"I started earning a living as a poet rather early on."

"I'm drowning in papers."

"In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed."

"Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice."

"It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself."

"Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy."

"Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die."

"Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand."

"No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring."

"Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice."

"Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan. Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two."

"Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry."

"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."

"Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands."

"Somewhere out there the world must have an end."

"Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light."

"This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile."

"Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."

"You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects."

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