Wisława Szymborska Quotes

"-NONREADING-

Bookstores don't provide
a remote control for Proust,
you can't switch
to a soccer match,
or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.

We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.

We travel faster, farther, more often,
but bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that's my ex.
Here everyone's naked
so this must be a beach.

Seven volumes — mercy.
Couldn't it be cut or summarized,
or better yet put into pictures.
There was that series called "The Doll,"
but my sister-in-law says that's some other P.*

And by the way, who was he anyway.
They say he wrote in bed for years on end.
Page after page
at a snail's pace.
But we're still going in fifth gear
and, knock on wood, never better."

For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls.

there were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
suitcases checked and standing side by side.
one night, perhaps, the same dream
grown hazy by morning.

every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

The price, after all, for not having died already
goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would
pay that price, too.

The world – whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing.

But ‘astonishing’ is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events’ … But 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.

Buscar sinceridad en unas memorias carece de sentido. Mejor sería preguntarse qué versión de uno mismo y del mundo ha escogido el autor, dado que siempre hay posibilidad de elegir.

And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself.

How should we live? someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

0 likes

You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.

I'm sorry that my voice was hard. Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried, look down on yourselves from the stars. They heard me and lowered their eyes.

Dimenticano che la vita non è qui.
Altre leggi, nero su bianco, vigono qui.
Un batter d’occhio durerà quanto dico io,
si lascerà dividere in piccole eternità
piene di pallottole fermate in volo.
Non una cosa avverrà qui se non voglio.
Senza il mio assenso non cadrà foglia,
né si piegherà stelo sotto il punto del piccolo zoccolo.

C’è dunque un mondo di cui reggo le sorti indipendenti?
Un tempo che lego con catene di segni?
Un esistere a mio comando incessante?
La gioia di scrivere.
Il potere di perpetuare.
La vendetta d’una mano mortale.

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

A thousand and one is still only a thousand. That one seems never to have existed: a

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