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 SZYMBORSKAThey say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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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It’s a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor’s orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.
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I 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.
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Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
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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 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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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA