Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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.
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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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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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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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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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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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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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Memory at last has what I sought.
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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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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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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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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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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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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.