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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.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
Wislawa Szymborska -
There's simply too much fuss about myself.
Wislawa Szymborska -
They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
Wislawa Szymborska -
The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Memory at last has what I sought.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
Wislawa Szymborska -
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.
Wislawa Szymborska -
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
Wislawa Szymborska -
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.
Wislawa Szymborska -
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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.
Wislawa Szymborska -
It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Wislawa Szymborska -
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!
Wislawa Szymborska