Top 100 Szymborska Quotes
#1. Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
From, The Joy of Writing, Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska
#2. You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.
Wislawa Szymborska
#3. You should learn Polish and read Szymborska!
Kevin Hearne
#5. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#7. So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres.
Wislawa Szymborska
#8. God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.
Wislawa Szymborska
#9. Whether you want it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political tone.
your eyes a political color.
...
you walk with political steps
on political ground.
Wislawa Szymborska
#10. How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.
From View With a Grain of Sand
Wislawa Szymborska
#11. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
Wislawa Szymborska
#12. I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#13. But 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#14. We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true. / But only into flesh and a broken whisper. / Into flesh and poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska
#15. They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.
Wislawa Szymborska
#17. 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
#18. I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.
Wislawa Szymborska
#19. 'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.
Wislawa Szymborska
#21. In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
Wislawa Szymborska
#22. Life on Earth is quite a bargain. Dreams, for one, don't charge admission. Illusions are costly only when lost.
Wislawa Szymborska
#23. The track's all yours. We won't get in your way: by then we will have set off chasing ourselves rather than you.
Wislawa Szymborska
#24. I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Wislawa Szymborska
#25. within the four walls of avalanches, I call out to Yeti.
Stomping my feet for warmth
on the snow
the snow eternal.
Wislawa Szymborska
#26. Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska
#27. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#28. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#29. Woods disguised as woods alive without end, and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.
Wislawa Szymborska
#30. I've wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it's a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.
Wislawa Szymborska
#31. This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
Wislawa Szymborska
#32. I slip my arm from underneath his sleeping head -
it's numb, swarming with imaginary pins.
A host of fallen angels perches on each tip,
waiting to be counted.
Wislawa Szymborska
#35. The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska
#38. All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
Wislawa Szymborska
#39. Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
Wislawa Szymborska
#40. They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.
Wislawa Szymborska
#41. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#42. Funny little thing. How could she know that even despair can work for you if you're lucky enough to outlive it. I'd
Wislawa Szymborska
#43. 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
#44. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#45. Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.
Wislawa Szymborska
#46. Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
Wislawa Szymborska
#47. Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.
Wislawa Szymborska
#48. 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 loss.
Wislawa Szymborska
#49. Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
Wislawa Szymborska
#50. Even if you bar my way,
even if you stare me in the face,
I'll pass you by on the chasm's edge, finer than a hair.
Wislawa Szymborska
#51. I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else.
Wislawa Szymborska
#52. The Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
Wislawa Szymborska
#53. Every beginning, after all, is nothing but a sequel, and the book of events is always open in the middle.
Wislawa Szymborska
#54. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#55. 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
#56. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?
Wislawa Szymborska
#57. No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
- three cheers for the ants.
Wislawa Szymborska
#58. Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
Wislawa Szymborska
#60. Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
Wislawa Szymborska
#61. Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still
Wislawa Szymborska
#62. History didn't greet us with triumphal fanfares: - it flung dirty sand into our eyes. Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere, poisoned wells and bitter bread.
Wislawa Szymborska
#63. You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
Wislawa Szymborska
#64. When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#67. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#68. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#69. You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
Wislawa Szymborska
#70. I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
Wislawa Szymborska
#71. 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!
Wislawa Szymborska
#72. They'll reenter their lives' cages, where love's tiger sometimes rages, but the beast's too tame to bite. We'll
Wislawa Szymborska
#74. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#75. Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two.
Wislawa Szymborska
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#81. What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?
Wislawa Szymborska
#82. A stone / which in its own archai, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.
Wislawa Szymborska
#84. It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
Wislawa Szymborska
#85. 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.
Wislawa Szymborska
#88. A thousand and one is still only a thousand. That one seems never to have existed: a
Wislawa Szymborska
#89. It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Wislawa Szymborska
#90. 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
#92. 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
#94. Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
Wislawa Szymborska
#98. Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Wislawa Szymborska
#100. When they said he didn't exist, he couldn't die of grief, so he had to be born. He's already out there living somewhere; he blinks his little eyes and grows.
Wislawa Szymborska
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