Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.
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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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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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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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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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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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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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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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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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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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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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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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Memory at last has what I sought.
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History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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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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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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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Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.