After every war someone has to tidy up.
Wislawa Szymborska

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.
Wislawa Szymborska

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.
Wislawa Szymborska

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

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

Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
Wislawa Szymborska

Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Wislawa Szymborska

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.
Wislawa Szymborska

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

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.
Wislawa Szymborska

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.
Wislawa Szymborska

I slide my arm from under the sleeper's head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
Wislawa Szymborska

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
Wislawa Szymborska

I'm drowning in papers.
Wislawa Szymborska

In every tragedy, an element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just tragedy reversed.
Wislawa Szymborska

Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice.
Wislawa Szymborska

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.
Wislawa Szymborska

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.
Wislawa Szymborska

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.
Wislawa Szymborska

Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
Wislawa Szymborska