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

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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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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.
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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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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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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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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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But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
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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.
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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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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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