All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
And whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA