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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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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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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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 old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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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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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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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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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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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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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 one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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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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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.