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I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
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
Mines
Mine
Role
Roles
Playing
Convertible
More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
Wislawa Szymborska
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
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'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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
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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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
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
You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
Wislawa Szymborska
Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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
Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous I don't know.
Wislawa Szymborska
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Wislawa Szymborska
Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Wislawa Szymborska
No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
Wislawa Szymborska
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
It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Wislawa Szymborska
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
Wislawa Szymborska
I'm drowning in papers.
Wislawa Szymborska
