All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAAll imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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 SZYMBORSKAI’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAEven the worst book can give us something to think about.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKATheir faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAIt’s a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor’s orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAThough I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAThey say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKALife lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKASuch certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI 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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKANothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAWhen I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA