Wisława Szymborska Quotes

92 Sourced Quotes

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses.

Wisława Szymborska
Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy,
our peacocks have renounced their plumes.
The bats flew out of our hair long ago. We fall silent in mid-sentence,
all smiles, past help.
Our humans
don't know how to talk to one another.

Wisława Szymborska
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.

Wisława Szymborska
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what the sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.

Wisława Szymborska
My cry could only waken him. And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues.

Wisława Szymborska
He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time.
All that was to pass passed in this house.
Not in housing projects,
not in furnished but empty quarters,
among unknown neighbors
on fifteenth floors
that student field trips rarely reach.

Wisława Szymborska
The counting of weekdays
would inevitably seem to be
a senseless activity;
dropping letters in the mailbox
a whim of foolish youth;
the sign "No Walking On The Grass"
a symptom of lunacy.

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

Wisława Szymborska
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.

Wisława Szymborska
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick themselves up, after all. Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Wisława Szymborska
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

Wisława Szymborska
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in." "I don't have a door," says the stone.

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

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

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

Wisława Szymborska
Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

Wisława Szymborska
And only we few who remain unstripped of fur,
untorn from bone, unplucked of soaring feathers,
esteemed in all our quills, scales, tusks, and horns,
and in whatever else that ingenious protein
has seen fit to clothe us with,
we, my lord, are your dream,
which finds you innocent for now.

Wisława Szymborska
There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment. Death
always arrives by that very moment too late. In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come can't be undone.

Wisława 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.

Wisława Szymborska
This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.

Wisława Szymborska
Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different.
Or a little bit different — which is to say, completely different.

Wisława Szymborska
I shake my memory.
Maybe something in its branches
that has been asleep for years
will start up with a flutter. No.
Clearly I'm asking too much.
Nothing less than one whole second.

Wisława Szymborska
Such is the memoir's tone. Noble and touching. But is it sincere? Oh, let's not be petty, seeking sincerity in memoirs doesn't make much sense.

Wisława Szymborska
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Wisława Szymborska
I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.

Wisława Szymborska
In Heraclitus' river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish,
a fish kneels to the fish, a fish sings to the fish,
a fish begs the fish to ease its fishy lot.

Wisława Szymborska
Born.
So he was born, too.
Born like everyone else.
Like me, who will die.
The son of an actual woman.
A new arrival from the body's depths.
A voyager to Omega.

Wisława Szymborska
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news. But that's just our simile. The character's invented, his haste is make-believe, his news inhuman.

Wisława Szymborska
Within him, there's awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy. God of humor, do something about him, OK?
God of humor, do something about him today.

Wisława Szymborska
He feels like a handle broken off a jug,
but the jug doesn't know it's broken and keeps going to the well.

Wisława Szymborska