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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 Szymborska

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Cosmos End Space World
I’m working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Dog Edition Myself Old Revision Work World
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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Angel Count Head Myself Sleep
There’s simply too much fuss about myself.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Confusion Mess Myself Simplicity
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Destroy Future Myself Past Silence Word
In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Comedy Element Preserve Tragedy
Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Knowledge Leadership Life Maintain Question Temperature
I’m fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Bad Fight Myself Poet Word
Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Book Mindset Thinking Worst
No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Feeling Good Morning Oneself
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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Choice Demand Loss Myself Rejection Way
Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Death Easy Finding Live Love People True
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.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Common Poet Publish Reading Understand
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Comparison Knowledge World
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Charm Morning Terrify Worth
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Absurd Myself Poem Preference Writing

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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