Quote

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

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.
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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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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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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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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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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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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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.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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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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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.
Wislawa Szymborska