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Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries.

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
Even
Misery
Work
Boring
Much
Havens
Haven
However
Harshest
Others
Loveless
Human
Miseries
Humans
Valued

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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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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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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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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.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
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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.
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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.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
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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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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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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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Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.
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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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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.
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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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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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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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