Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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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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 like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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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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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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.
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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.
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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
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Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.
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I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.