Wislawa Szymborska Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska, “Possibilities”
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“Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“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.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Map: Collected and Last Poems”, p.190, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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“All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
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“I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
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“All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wisława Szymborska (1981). “Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems”, p.43, Princeton University Press
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“When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Map: Collected and Last Poems”, p.328, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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“This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Map: Collected and Last Poems”, p.291, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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“I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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“Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska, Stanisław Barańczak, Clare Cavanagh (2000). “Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997”, p.16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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“All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
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“I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
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“Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out...”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
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“Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“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.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
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“Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.”
-- Wislawa Szymborska -
“Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.”
-- Wislawa SzymborskaSource : Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces”, p.207, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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