I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAIn every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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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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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 don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
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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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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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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They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
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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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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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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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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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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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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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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don’t like to joke.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA