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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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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
Hour
Poetry
Takes
Hours
Point
Speak
Cannot
Life
Exclusively

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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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Today when two people decide upon a thoughtless and precipitate abbreviation of the physical space between them, they think, at least at that moment, that they're mutually attracted and drawn together by an overwhelming force.
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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
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I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
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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.
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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.
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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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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
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Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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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.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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