Quote

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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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
Authenticity
Looks
Conscious
Different
Among
Shells
Even
Animal
Intended
Trying
Found
Scales
Plumes
Nature
Impulse
Spines
Change
Appearance
Humbly
Look
Animals
Spine
Humans
Wear

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
Wislawa Szymborska
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God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Wislawa Szymborska
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They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
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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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Wislawa Szymborska
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I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of lifes wisdom.
Wislawa Szymborska
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When I mention somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean that I identify with him, personally or poetically. I'm extremely happy when I encounter poets who are different than I am. The ones who have their own distinct poetics provide me with the greatest experiences.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Wislawa Szymborska
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
Wislawa Szymborska
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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
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Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
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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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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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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 don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
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