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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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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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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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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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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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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I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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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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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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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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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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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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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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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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.