Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

• You know, I’m worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• 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.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• 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

• Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• There’s simply too much fuss about myself.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’: that’s what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• 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

• Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• 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

• Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.

  Wislawa Szymborska

• Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.

  Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska (44)

Birth:	2nd July, 1923
Death:	1st February, 2012
Nationality:	Polish
Profession:	Essayist, Poet, Translator

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Today's Anniversary - 31st January

Births

• 1913 - Don Hutson
• 1973 - Portia De Rossi
• 1949 - Ken Wilber
• 1935 - Kenzaburo Oe
• 1920 - Stewart Udall

Deaths

• 2007 - Molly Ivins
• 1974 - Samuel Goldwyn
• 1895 - Samuel Ward McAllister
• 1889 - William Stephenson