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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

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
Comparison
Worlds
World

More quotes by 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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
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Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous I don't know.
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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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
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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
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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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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.
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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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
Wislawa Szymborska