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.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

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

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

Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

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

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

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

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