Quotes from 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.

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.

Every beginning, after all, is nothing but a sequel, and the book of events is always open in the middle.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

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

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

Somewhere out there the world must have an end.

Dying - you can't do that to a cat.

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.

Four billion people on this earth but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go by, never coming to mind and never really missed.

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.

No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.

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.

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

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

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

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.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

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

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

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

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.