Welcome to our collection of quotes by Wisława Szymborska. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Wisława Szymborska
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (Polish: [viˈswava ʂɨmˈbɔrska]; 2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of Kórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors', though she wrote in a poem, "Some Like Poetry" ("Niektórzy lubią poezję"), that "perhaps" two in a thousand people like poetry.
Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality". She became better known internationally as a result. Her work has been translated into English and many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian and Chinese.
You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.
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!
I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants.
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.
Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.
I'm drowning in papers.
Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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.
I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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.
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.
I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
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.
There's simply too much fuss about myself.
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.
Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
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.
I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.
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.
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.
I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.
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.
They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?
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.
'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind.
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.
It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.
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.
It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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 life's wisdom.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.
Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
After every war someone has to tidy up.
Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.
You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.
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.
You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.
When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.