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

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Dying - you can't do that to a cat.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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Something doesn't start at its usual time. Something doesn't happen as it should. Someone was always, always here, then suddenly disappeared and stubbornly stays disappeared.
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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.
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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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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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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely
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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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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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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.
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There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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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.
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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 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.
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Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious they don't like to joke.
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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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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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