Wisława Szymborska Quotes

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

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.

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 by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.