Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Wislawa Szymborska - Page 2

A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.

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

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.

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.

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

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

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

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.

No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.

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.

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

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

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

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

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

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

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

I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Memory at last has what I sought.

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

When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.

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

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.

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.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.