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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
Books
Reading
Book
Think
Devised
Thinking
Pastime
Fashioned
Humankind
Glorious

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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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.
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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
Wislawa Szymborska
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
Wislawa Szymborska
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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I'm drowning in papers.
Wislawa Szymborska
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
Wislawa Szymborska
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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
Wislawa Szymborska
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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
Wislawa Szymborska