Quotes from Wis?awa Szymborska

I've wanted to write about them for a long while, but it's a tricky subject, always put off for later and perhaps worthy of a better poet, even more stunned by the world than I. But time is short. I write.

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.

a stone / which in its own archaic, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

Cierta gente huyendo de otra gente. En cierto país bajo el sol y bajo ciertas nubes.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.   Even

History didn't greet us with triumphal fanfares: —it flung dirty sand into our eyes. Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere, poisoned wells and bitter bread.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books, the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses— if anything fits, it's accidental, and for one reason only, that in our dreamings, in their shadowings and gleamings, in their multiplings, inconceivablings, in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.

A che serve qui chiedersi sotto quante stelle nasce l'uomo, e sotto quante dopo un attimo muore.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past.

Po ka?dej wojnie kto? musi posprz?ta?.

We all use phrases such as 'the ordinary world,' 'ordinary life,' 'the ordinary course of events.' But in the language of poetry, 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.

We treat each other with exceeding courtesy; we says, it's great to see you after all these years. Our tigers drink milk. Our hawks tread the ground. Our sharks have all drowned. Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage. Our snakes have shed their lightning, our apes their flights of fancy, our peacocks have renounced their plumes. The bats flew out of our hair long ago. We fall silent in mid-sentence, all smiles, past help. Our humans don't know how to talk to one another.

So how do you suddenly lose the habit of yourself? of day follows night? of the snows of yesteryear? of rosy apples? of the yearning for love, which is never enough? from "Moment of Silence

I have no idea who dreamed up the idiotic notion that summer vacations require light reading. Just the opposite, since the light books get read—if any reading's done at all—before bedtime, after the office work and house work, when we lack the concentration required for heavier fare.

Czemu ty si?, z?a godzino, z niepotrzebnym mieszasz l?kiem? Jeste? - a wi?c musisz min??. Miniesz - a wi?c to jest pi?kne

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.

We've inherited hope— the gift of forgetting.

Every menu is an obituary.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Me parece que solo será a partir de la próxima generación cuando caminar se convierta en algo vanguardista.

Our times are still not safe and sane enough for faces to show ordinary sorrow.

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.

But human beings are, by nature, sad. So be it, then. It isn't all that bad.

No carece de encantos un mundo tan terrible, no carece de madrugadas que merecen un despertar.