Wisława Szymborska Quotes

God was finally going to believe in a man both good and strong, but good and strong are still two different men.

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

Few of them made it to thirty. Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees. Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow. One had to hurry, to get on with life before the sun went down, before the first snow.

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.

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

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.

We call it a grain of sand but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect or apt.

Show me your little poem and I'll tell you why it wasn't written any earlier or later than it was.<p>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.

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light.

Millennia have passed since you first called me archaeology. I no longer require your stone gods, your ruins with legible inscriptions. Show me your whatever and I'll tell you who you were.

On this third planet from the sun among the signs of bestiality a clear conscience is Number One.

The going's rough, and so we need the laugh of bright incisors, molars of goodwill. Our times are still not safe and sane enough for faces to show ordinary sorrow.

I felt age within me. Distance. The futility of wandering. Torpor. I looked back setting my bundle down. I looked back not knowing where to set my foot. Serpents appeared on my path, spiders, field mice, baby vultures. They were neither good nor evil now — every living thing was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.

And how can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?<p>Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting! And dust blowing all over the steppes as if they hadn't been partitioned! And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves, that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters! Only what is human can truly be foreign.

My dreams — even they're not as populous as they should be. They hold more solitude than noisy crowds.