No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAEven the worst book can give us something to think about.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
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They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.
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I’m drowning in papers.
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I’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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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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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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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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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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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
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I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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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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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
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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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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA