Quotes By Wislawa Szymborska

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 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 life's wisdom.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

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

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.

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

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.

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

I'm drowning in papers.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

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

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.