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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

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
Something
Primacy
Agreement
Regard
Imagination
Common
Reality
Best

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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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.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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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I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
Wislawa Szymborska
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
Wislawa Szymborska
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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska