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

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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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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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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's a gift, it's all on loan
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I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.
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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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I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
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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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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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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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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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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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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
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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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