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

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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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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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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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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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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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Memory at last has what I sought.
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No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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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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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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I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
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We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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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.
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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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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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Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.
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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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