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

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

"After every war someone has to tidy up."

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

"Somewhere out there the world must have an end."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."

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

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

"I started earning a living as a poet rather early on."

"This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light."

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

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

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

"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."