Wislawa Szymborska quotes

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 life's wisdom.

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 life's wisdom.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

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

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.