Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKASometimes 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!
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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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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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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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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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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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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Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.
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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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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
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Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
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I don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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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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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
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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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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA