There’s simply too much fuss about myself.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAThere’s simply too much fuss about myself.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAAt 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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAAnd whatever I do will become forever what I’ve done.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAMy 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 SZYMBORSKAThey say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAAll is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKANo day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKANo one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAAny knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI 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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKASomewhere out there the world must have an end.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAYou can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKALife lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAPoetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKACarry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAAfter every war someone has to tidy up.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA