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Octavio Paz QUOTES

Octavio Paz QUOTES

1 " Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival. "

― Octavio Paz , The Collected Poems, 1957-1987

2 " This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul. "

― Octavio Paz , The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

3 " Mineral cactai,
quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,
the bird that punctures space,
thirst, tedium, clouds of dust,
impalpable epiphanies of wind.
The pines taught me to talk to myself.
In that garden I learnedto send myself off.
Later there were no gardens. "

― Octavio Paz , A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems

4 " because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being... "

― Octavio Paz , Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

5 " To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations. "

― Octavio Paz , The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

6 " When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings "

― Octavio Paz , The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

7 " life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away "

― Octavio Paz , Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

8 " better the crime,
the suicides of lovers, the incest committed
by brother and sister like two mirrors
in love with their likeness, better to eat
the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed
of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous
vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears
a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,
better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn
the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,
that turns eternity into empty hours,
minutes into prisons, and time into
copper coins and abstract shit "

― Octavio Paz , Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

9 " The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate. "

― Octavio Paz

10 " Coda

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves. "

― Octavio Paz

11 " When we learn to speak, we learn to translate. "

― Octavio Paz

12 " I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? "

― Octavio Paz

13 " Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism. "

― Octavio Paz

14 " There was only one huge world with no back to it
A world like a sun
One day it broke into tiny pieces
They were the words of the language we now speak
Pieces that will never come together
Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered "

― Octavio Paz , Selected Poems

15 " Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text. "

― Octavio Paz

16 " At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.

I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes. "

― Octavio Paz , The Blue Bouquet

17 " Everything is language. "

― Octavio Paz , El arco y la lira: El poema. La revelación poética. Poesía e historia

18 " A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet…, even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end—it too fades away to nothingness. "

― Octavio Paz , The Monkey Grammarian

19 " After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring. "

― Octavio Paz , Selected Poems

20 " Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death. "

― Octavio Paz