I don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAPoets 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.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
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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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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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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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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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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
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And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
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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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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