In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAThough I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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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Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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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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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
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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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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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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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And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
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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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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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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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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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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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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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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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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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA