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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

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
Funny
Doses
Dose
Imperfection
Served
Tolerate
Easier
Small

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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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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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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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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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
Wislawa Szymborska
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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
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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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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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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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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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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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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.
Wislawa Szymborska