Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.
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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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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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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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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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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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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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 like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
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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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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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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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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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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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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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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.