Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

The world, whatever we might think about it terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering - of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants are free of suffering; whatever we might think about its spaces pierced by the radiation of stars, stars around which we now have begun to discover planets, already dead? still dead? - we don't know; whatever we might think about this immense theater, to which we may have a ticket, but it is valid for a ridiculously brief time, limited by two decisive dates; whatever else we might think about this world - it is amazing. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing Twice Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you're the planet's biggest dunce, you can't repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with exactly the same kisses. One day, perhaps, some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent. The next day, though you're here with me, I can't help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is it a flower or a rock? Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to stay: today is always gone tomorrow. With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we're different (we concur) just as two drops of water are. ~ 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

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

A stone / which in its own archai, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Even if you bar my way,
even if you stare me in the face,
I'll pass you by on the chasm's edge, finer than a hair. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

Every menu is an obituary. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I slip my arm from underneath his sleeping head -
it's numb, swarming with imaginary pins.
A host of fallen angels perches on each tip,
waiting to be counted. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

We know ourselves only as far as we've been tested. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

within the four walls of avalanches, I call out to Yeti.
Stomping my feet for warmth
on the snow
the snow eternal. ~ 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

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring
this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

There's simply too much fuss about myself. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

A thousand and one is still only a thousand. That one seems never to have existed: a ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

They'll reenter their lives' cages, where love's tiger sometimes rages, but the beast's too tame to bite. We'll ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
From, The Joy of Writing, Wislawa Szymborska ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

Life on Earth is quite a bargain. Dreams, for one, don't charge admission. Illusions are costly only when lost. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink! ~ Wislawa Szymborska

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn't possible to save mankind. ~ 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

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Even a passing moment has its fertile past. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Out of every hundred people, those who always know better: fifty-two. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Whether you want it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political tone.
your eyes a political color.
...
you walk with political steps
on political ground. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Generally speaking, life is so rich and full of variety; you have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

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

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? ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own? ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I am telling him
what he wants to hear: ants
dying of love under
the constellation of the dandelion.
I swear that a white rose,
sprinkled with wine, sings.
I am laughing, tilting
my head carefully
as if checking an invention.
I am dancing, dancing
in astonished skin, in
an embrace that creates me. ~ 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

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. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too. ~ Wisława Szymborska

It turns out I was right.
But nothing has come of it. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

History didn't greet us with triumphal fanfares: - it flung dirty sand into our eyes. Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere, poisoned wells and bitter bread. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

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

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

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important. ~ 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

I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the 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 oeuvre. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
...
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody's place in line. ~ 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

I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I'll never find out now
What A. thought of me.
If B. ever forgave me in the end.
Why C. pretended everything was fine.
What part D. played in E.'s silence.
What F. had been expecting, if anything.
Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well.
What H. had to hide.
What I. wanted to add.
If my being around
meant anything
to J. and K. and the rest of the alphabet. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Even the worst book can give us something to think about. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

Memory at last has what I sought. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I'd have to be really quick to describe clouds - a split second's enough for them to start being something else. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.
The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.
The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out ... ~ Wislawa Szymborska

When it comes, you'll be dreaming that you don't need to breathe; that breathless silence is the music of the dark and it's part of the rhythm to vanish like a spark. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

The Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

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. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Somewhere out there the world must have an end. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

After every war someone has to tidy up. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

How should we live? someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

0 likes ~ Wislawa Szymborska

in painted quiet and concentration ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Poorly prepared for the dignity of life, I barely keep up with the pace of the action imposed. Reality demands. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
It must eat and breath air and sleep,
It has thin skin and blood right underneath,
An adequate stock of teeth and nails,
Its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it is shuddered
Before the founding of Rome and after,
In the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
And whatever happens seems on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed.
It's just that there are more people,
Besides the old offenses, new ones have appeared,
Real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
But the howl with which the body responds to them,
Was, and is, and ever will be a howl of innocence
According to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed.
Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances,
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tries to pull away
Its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
It turns blue, swells, salivates, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except of course for the course of boundaries,
The lines of forests, coasts, deserts, and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
Disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves a ~ Wisława Szymborska

Letters to the Dead"

We read the letters of the dead like puzzled gods --
gods nevertheless, because we know what happened later.
We know what money wasn't repaid,
the widows who rushed to remarry.
Poor, unseeing dead,
deceived, fallible, toiling in solemn foolery.
We see the signs made behind their backs,
catch the rustle of ripped-up wills.
They sit there before us, ridiculous
as things perched on buttered bread,
or fling themselves after whisked-away hats.
Their bad taste -- Napoleon, steam and electricity,
deadly remedies for curable diseases,
the foolish apocalypse of St. John,
the false paradise on earth of Jean-Jacques . . .
Silently, we observe their pawns on the board
-- but shifted three squares on.
Everything they foresaw has happened quite differently,
or a little differently -- which is the same thing.
The most fervent stare trustingly into our eyes;
by their reckoning, they'll see perfection there. ~ Wisława Szymborska

One more comment from the heart: I'm old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don't wish to diminish the significance of these distractions-without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and possibly dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he's capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He's permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words he'll keep for a life time. And finally, he's free-and no other hobby can promise this-to eavesdrop on Montaigne's arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic. ~ Wisława Szymborska

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses -
if anything fits,
it's accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through. ~ Wisława Szymborska

Let me have your abyss. ~ Wisława Szymborska

You should learn Polish and read Szymborska! ~ Kevin Hearne

Under a Certain Little Star"

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the
abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably
at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
veil.

Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
woman.
I know that ~ Wisława Szymborska