Wislawa Szymborska Quotes - Page 2

I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!

In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?

The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.

No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.

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.

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.

History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries.

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.