Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of Kórnik, she later resided in Kraków until the end of her life. She is described as a "Mozart of Poetry". In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors: although she once remarked in a poem, "Some Like Poetry", that no more than two out of a thousand people care...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 July 1923
CountryPoland
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
I'm one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
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.
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.
But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
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.
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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 blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.
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 lifes wisdom.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
I'm drowning in papers.