Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.

From View With a Grain of Sand

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

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

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

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

Every beginning, after all, is nothing but a sequel, and the book of events is always open in the middle.

How should we live? someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

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The track's all yours. We won't get in your way: by then we will have set off chasing ourselves rather than you.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.

What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?

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

In these lands you're a name to avoid, you're bound for defeat, you're a sign pointing out those who must be destroyed. At

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

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

Even if you bar my way,
even if you stare me in the face,
I'll pass you by on the chasm's edge, finer than a hair.

Life on Earth is quite a bargain. Dreams, for one, don't charge admission. Illusions are costly only when lost.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.

A thousand and one is still only a thousand. That one seems never to have existed: a

They'll reenter their lives' cages, where love's tiger sometimes rages, but the beast's too tame to bite. We'll

Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.

You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.

I'm drowning in papers.

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

within the four walls of avalanches, I call out to Yeti.
Stomping my feet for warmth
on the snow
the snow eternal.

Woods disguised as woods alive without end, and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.

Funny little thing. How could she know that even despair can work for you if you're lucky enough to outlive it. I'd

Every menu is an obituary.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

It turns out I was right.
But nothing has come of it.

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

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.

My apologies to past loves for treating the latest as the first.

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

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

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

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.

I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.

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

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

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

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

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.

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past.

I let myself be invented, modeled on my own reflection in his eyes. I dance, dance, dance in the stir of sudden wings. The

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

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

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

We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true. / But only into flesh and a broken whisper. / Into flesh and poetry.

Memory at last has what I sought.

But 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.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

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

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

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

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

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.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

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

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

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

I am my own obstacle.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

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.

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.

We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.

in painted quiet and concentration

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

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

I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

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

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

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

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

We know ourselves only as far as we've been tested.

A stone / which in its own archai, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.

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

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