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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.

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
Fortunate
Longer
Live
Long
Kind
Would
Unquestionably
Time
Precisely
World
Extremely

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Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.
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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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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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Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
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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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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
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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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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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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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Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
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Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
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Memory at last has what I sought.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
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I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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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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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.
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