Wisława Szymborska: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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.”

“The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”

“Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still”

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

“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.”

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

“True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?”

“I am my own obstacle.”

“It's shocking, the positions,
the unchecked simplicity with which
one mind contrives to fertilize another!
Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn't know.”

“Show me your little poem
and I'll tell you why it wasn't written
any earlier or later than it was.Oh no, you've got me wrong.
Keep your funny piece of paper
with its scribbles.
All I need for my ends
is your layer of dirt
and the long gone
smell of burning.”

“I, the solitary fish, a fish apart
(apart at least from the tree fish and the stone fish),
write, at isolated moments, a tiny fish or two
whose glittering scales, so fleeting,
may only be the dark's embarrassed wink.”

“They were or they weren't.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
Swallowed them up or it didn't.”