In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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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.
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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.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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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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We’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
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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.
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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 the worst book can give us something to think about.
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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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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!
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA