Quotes from Octavio Paz

Si las revoluciones no se hacen con palabras, las ideas no se implantan con decretos.

Two bodies face to face Are at times two waves And the night is an ocean. Two bodies face to face Are sometimes two stones And the night a desert.

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?

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.

Mil cosas solicitan a la vez nuestra atención y ninguna de ellas logra retenernos; así la vida se nos vuelve arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro.

Everything is language.

Sentirse solo no es sentirse inferior, sino distinto. El sentimiento de soledad no es una ilusión —como a veces lo es el de inferioridad— sino la expresión de un hecho real: somos, de verdad, distintos. Y, de verdad, estamos solos.

I heard my blood, singing in its prison, and the sea sang with a murmur of light, one by one the walls gave way, all of the doors were broken down, and the sun came bursting through my forehead, it tore apart my closed lids, cut loose my being from its wrappers, and pulled me out of myself to wake me from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone

you are you and your body of steam, you and your face of night, you and your hair, unhurried lightning, you cross the street and enter my forehead, footsteps of water across my eyes, listen to me as one listens to the rain

Eroticism is] the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear, it meanders and twists back on itself, shows us what we do not see with our eyes, but in the eyes of our spirit. Eroticism reveals to us another world, inside this world. The senses become servants of the imagination, and let us see the invisible and hear the inaudible.

Bodies are visible hieroglyphs. Every body is an erotic metaphor, and the meaning of all these metaphors is always the same: death.

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality--if only for an instant--by means of creation.

El amor es intensidad y por esto es una distensión del tiempo: estira los minutos y los alarga como siglos.

Pues apenas el tiempo se divide en ayer, hoy y mañana, en horas, minutos y segundos, el hombre cesa de ser uno con el tiempo, cesa de coincidir con el fluir de la realidad.

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

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

En lugar de interrogarnos a nosotros mismos,¿no sería mejor crear, obrar sobre una realidad que no se entrega al que la contempla, sino al que es capaz de sumergirse en ella?

The past reappears because it is a hidden present.

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.

La resignación es una de nuestras virtudes populares. Más que el brillo de la victoria nos conmueve la entereza ante la adversidad.

He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question

Y no es extraordinario que, desparecidas las causas, persistan los efectos? ¿Y que los efectos oculten a las causas?

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

Mato de hambre al amor, para que devore lo que encuentre.