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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.

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
Silence
Already
Word
Future
Syllable
Past
Pronounce
Firsts
Syllables
First
Belongs
Destroy

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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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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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
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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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Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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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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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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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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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
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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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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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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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