Quotes from Octavio Paz

nacimos cuando ya era tarde en la historia, tampoco tenemos un pasado o, si lo tenemos, hemos escupido sobre sus restos, nuestros pueblos se echaron a dormir durante un siglo y mientras dormían los robaron y ahora andan en andrajos, no logramos conservar ni siquiera lo que los españoles dejaron al irse, nos hemos apuñalado entre nosotros...-.

La poesía nos hace tocar lo impalpable y escuchar la marea del silencio cubriendo un paisaje devastado por el insomnio.

El amor es escándalo, desorden, transgresión: el de dos astros que rompen la fatalidad de sus órbitas y se encuentran en la mitad del espacio.

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects.

In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.

An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.

The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

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.

Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

My steps along this streetResoundin another streetIn whichI hear my stepsPassing along this streetIn whichOnly the mist is real.

a crystal willow, a poplar of water,a tall fountain the wind arches over,a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still,a course of a river that turns, moves on,doubles back, and comes full circle,forever arriving:

Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.