-
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.
Wislawa Szymborska -
All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
Wislawa Szymborska
-
I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
Wislawa Szymborska -
All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
Wislawa Szymborska -
I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they're mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force.
Wislawa Szymborska
-
Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know".
Wislawa Szymborska -
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
Wislawa Szymborska -
It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
Wislawa Szymborska -
Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
Wislawa Szymborska
-
No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Wislawa Szymborska -
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.
Wislawa Szymborska -
I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Wislawa Szymborska