I’m drowning in papers.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAIt’s a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor’s orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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.
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I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
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Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
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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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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.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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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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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When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.
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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 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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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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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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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA