I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds – a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAGenerally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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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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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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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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Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
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Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
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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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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I like being near the top of a mountain. One can’t get lost here.
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I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
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Something 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.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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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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I’m drowning in papers.
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They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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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