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I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

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
Hiker
Hiking
Near
Mountain
Lost
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More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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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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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
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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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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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.
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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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No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
Wislawa Szymborska
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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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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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
Wislawa Szymborska
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We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
Wislawa Szymborska
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History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle, ... emptiness running down steps toward the garden, nobody's place in line.
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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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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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I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
Wislawa Szymborska
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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
Wislawa Szymborska
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
Wislawa Szymborska