Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.

Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Time flies like an arrow - but fruit flies like a banana.

The point—the power to hurt—of all figures [of speech] consist in the truthfulness of their application.

The exact meaning of irony is so narrow that the word is hardly worth using; in its broad, current definition, it's a euphemism for sarcasm. 'I'm not being sarcastic; I'm being ironic.' No, you're not. You're evading the responsibility for being sarcastic.

All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way.

I am a consummate metaphor addict.

Even if that were true, it wouldn't be irony," Lucas pointed out. "Irony is the contrast between what's said and what happens.

Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.

One of your jobs as a speechwriter is to transform the bureaucratic into the poetic.

I would engage in a sort of syntax destruction that would sound like I was answering the question but actually was not.

Hyperbole engaged in consciously to achieve a desired effect can be, as we have noted, a useful rhetorical tool. Indeed, its use in this manner is sometimes called "exaggeration in the service of truth." However, there's much to be said for restraint of tongue and pen, and restraint refers not only to what we say but also to how we say it. It is possible, believe it or not, to be emphatic without indulging in overstatement; it is possible to be forceful without exaggerating.

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

When I say 'Crush your enemy', I don't literally mean it.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.