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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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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
Littles
Poets
Anything
Daily
Little
Poet
Understood
Yearn
Courses
Herd
Course
Herds
Common
Grind
Read
Published

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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
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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.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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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.
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I'm drowning in papers.
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No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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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.
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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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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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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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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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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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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