Quotes by Wislawa Szymborska
Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
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.
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.
Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.
All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
No one in my family has ever died of love. What happened, happened, but nothing myth-inspiring.
In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands.
Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
I don't know the role I'm playing. I only know it's mine, non-convertible.
Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke.
