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 SZYMBORSKAI don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.
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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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My choices are rejections, since there is no other way, but what I reject is more numerous, denser, more demanding than before. A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.
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Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
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Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
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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.
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It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
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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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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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I’m drowning in papers.
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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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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. You walk with political steps on political ground.
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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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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
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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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Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
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They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
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Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA