Quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

• In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
• Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
• You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
• 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.
• Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
• All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
• After every war someone has to tidy up.
• It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
• All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
• 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.
• All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
• Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
• Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
• Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
• I'm drowning in papers.
• Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
• Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.
• Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
• 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.
• Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
• Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
• I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.