Quotes By Wislawa Szymborska

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.