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I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.

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
Prefer
Chaos
Hell
Order

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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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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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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I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
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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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I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
Wislawa Szymborska
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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.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan
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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.
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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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.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Wislawa Szymborska
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And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.
Wislawa Szymborska
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They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska