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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.

Wislawa Szymborska

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Wislawa Szymborska
Age: 88 †
Born: 1923
Born: July 2
Died: 2012
Died: February 1
Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Mechanic
Poet
Translator
Writer
Kornik
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska
Szymborska
Angels
Swarming
Fallen
Sleeper
Angel
Sleepers
Arms
Slide
Full
Counted
Head
Numb
Waiting
Slides
Hands
Pins

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Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.
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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.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
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God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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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.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.
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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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