3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska 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.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
