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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan

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
Loan
Gift
Nothing

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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Wislawa Szymborska
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.
Wislawa Szymborska
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It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
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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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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
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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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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Wislawa Szymborska
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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska