All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI 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.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
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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Memory at last has what I sought.
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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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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
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.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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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.
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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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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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Animals don’t even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. The conscious impulse to change one’s appearance is found only among humans.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA