Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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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.
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I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
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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.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
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I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
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I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.