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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
Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
Wislawa Szymborska
Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries.
Wislawa Szymborska
I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
Wislawa Szymborska
I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
Wislawa Szymborska
When it comes, you’ll be dreaming that you don’t need to breathe that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it’s part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark.
Wislawa Szymborska
They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
Wislawa Szymborska
There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
Wislawa Szymborska
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
Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
Wislawa Szymborska
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Wislawa Szymborska
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
God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Wislawa Szymborska
Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Wislawa Szymborska
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
Wislawa Szymborska
I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.
Wislawa Szymborska
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
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
The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska
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