Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

There’s simply too much fuss about myself.

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

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

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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