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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
Roles
Playing
Convertible
Mines
Mine
Role

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
Wislawa Szymborska
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.
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. Even the richest, most surprising and wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surprising as reality. The task of the poet is to pick singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.
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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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
Wislawa Szymborska
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I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
Wislawa Szymborska
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At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.
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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Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. ... you walk with political steps on political ground.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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