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

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
Thinking
Pastime
Fashioned
Humankind
Glorious
Books
Reading
Book
Think
Devised

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When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
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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.
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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.
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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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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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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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'm drowning in papers.
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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.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
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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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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
Wislawa Szymborska