I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKANo day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.
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Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.
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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 don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
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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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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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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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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.
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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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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