Szymborska O Quotes & Sayings

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand. — Wislawa Szymborska

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again. — Wislawa Szymborska

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on. — 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

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

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan — Wislawa Szymborska

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

You should learn Polish and read Szymborska! — Kevin Hearne

You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking. — Wislawa Szymborska

How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.

From View With a Grain of Sand — Wislawa Szymborska

-NONREADING-


Bookstores don't provide
a remote control for Proust,
you can't switch
to a soccer match,
or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.


We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.


We travel faster, farther, more often,
but bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that's my ex.
Here everyone's naked
so this must be a beach.


Seven volumes - mercy.
Couldn't it be cut or summarized,
or better yet put into pictures.
There was that series called "The Doll,"
but my sister-in-law says that's some other P.*


And by the way, who was he anyway.
They say he wrote in bed for years on end.
Page after page
at a snail's pace.
But we're still going in fifth gear
and, knock on wood, never better. — 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

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light. — 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

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

Existentialists are monumentally and monotonously serious; they don't like to joke. — Wislawa Szymborska

Woods disguised as woods alive without end, and above them birds in flight play birds in flight. — 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

We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences. — Wislawa Szymborska

It's a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor's orders, you have to be healthy as a horse. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as
my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories
fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. — Wislawa Szymborska

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."...That is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended...Poets, if they're genuine, must always keep repeating "I don't know. — Wislawa Szymborska

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

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

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses. — Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to past loves for treating the latest as the first. — Wislawa Szymborska

We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true. / But only into flesh and a broken whisper. / Into flesh and poetry. — Wislawa Szymborska