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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKASomething 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.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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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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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.
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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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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA