I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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.
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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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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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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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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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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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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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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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I don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
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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.
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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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Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
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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 like being near the top of a mountain. One can’t get lost here.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
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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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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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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.
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They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
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I’m drowning in papers.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA