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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.

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
Also
Chairs
Even
Corners
Table
Tables
Keeps
Shadow
Nearby
Quiet
Discerning
Four
Shadows

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I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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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.
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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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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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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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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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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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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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We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
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Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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.
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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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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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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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