Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.
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I’m drowning in papers.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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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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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Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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Sometimes 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!
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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’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
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And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
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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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
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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