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Quotes by 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
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
– Wislawa Szymborska
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.
– Wislawa 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.
– Wislawa Szymborska
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.
– 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
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
– Wislawa Szymborska
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
– Wislawa Szymborska
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.
– 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
Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
– Wislawa Szymborska
All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
– Wislawa Szymborska
After every war someone has to tidy up.
– Wislawa Szymborska