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.
More quotes from Wislawa Szymborska
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.
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Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
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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.
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All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
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Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
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You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
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Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.
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Somewhere out there the world must have an end.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.
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Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.
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I’m drowning in papers.
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In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.
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Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
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All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
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All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
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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.
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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.
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After every war someone has to tidy up.
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I like being near the top of a mountain. One can’t get lost here.
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Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
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Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
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I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
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It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
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Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.
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