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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAMy 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.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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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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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
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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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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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
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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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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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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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
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It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
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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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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA






