Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

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

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

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.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they're mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force.

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.

It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan

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

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

Dying - you can't do that to a cat.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.

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

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

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.

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.

They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.

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

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.

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.

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.

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

I'm drowning in papers.

Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. 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. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

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.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.