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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

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
Sand
Lasts
Life
Claw
Claws
Scratches

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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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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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.
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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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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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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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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 prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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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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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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Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous I don't know.
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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.
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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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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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
Wislawa Szymborska