Quotes from Octavio Paz

No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.

Merece lo que sueñas.

listen to me as one listens to the rain, the years go by, the moments return, do you hear the footsteps in the next room? not here, not there: you hear them in another time that is now, listen to the footsteps of time, inventor of places with no weight, nowhere, listen to the rain running over the terrace, the night is now more night in the grove, lightning has nestled among the leaves, a restless garden adrift-go in, your shadow covers this page.

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.

Ser uno mismo es, siempre, llegar a ser ese otro que somos y que llevamos escondido en nuestro interior, más que nada como promesa o posibilidad de ser.

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.

que busca? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar. ...what is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny. Perhaps his destiny is to search.

Una civilización que niega a la muerte, acaba por negar a la vida.

Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.

All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can't be touched.

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.

Dime cómo mueres y te diré quien eres.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.