Quotes from Octavio Paz

The absolutes the eternitiesTheir outlying districtsAre not my themeI am hungry for life and for death alsoI know what I know and I write it.

Our democratic capitalist society has converted Eros into an employee of Mammon.

Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.

Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Would it not be true to say that North Americans prefer to use reality rather than to know it?

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

the world changes if two, dizzy and entwined, fall on the grass

There can be a "boom" in petroleum or wheat, but there can't be a boom in the novel and less still in poetry.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.

Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.

Deserve your dream.

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

Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

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...

I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.

It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has 'invented' himself by saying 'no' to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.