Top 30 Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

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’m drowning in papers.

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

There’s simply too much fuss about myself.

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

After every war someone has to tidy up.

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

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.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

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

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.

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

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.

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.

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!

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. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

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

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

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. 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.

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

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.