Quotes from Octavio Paz

The Bridge Between now and now, between I am and you are, the word bridge. Entering it you enter yourself: the world connects and closes like a ring. From one bank to another, there is always a body stretched: a rainbow. I'll sleep beneath its arches.

al entrar en ti mismo no sales del mundo

it becomes clear that chronometric time is a homogeneous succession lacking all particularity. It is always the same, always indifferent to pleasure or pain. Mythological time, on the other hand, is impregnated with all the particulars of our lives: it is as long as eternity or as short as a breath, ominous or propitious, fecund or sterile.

like a mountain path that ends at a cliff I travel along the edge of your thoughts, and my shadow falls from your white forehead, my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces and go with no body, groping my way

Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self.

o love is to battle, if two kiss the world changes, desires take flesh thoughts take flesh, wings sprout on the backs of the slave, the world is real and tangible, wine is wine, bread regains its savor, water is water, to love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see Piedra de Sol (The Sun Stone), translated by Eliot Weinberger

Reality is always at the edge of the abyss, hung from the thread of a thought.

La palabra del hombre es hija de la muerte. Hablamos porque somos mortales: las palabras no son signos. Son años. Al decir lo que dicen los nombres que decimos dicen tiempo: nos dicen, somos hombres del tiempo. Conversar es humano.

Los ojos se cierran, las palabras se abren.

oh life to live, life already lived, time that comes back in a swell of sea, time that recedes without turning its head, the past is not past, it is still passing by, flowing silently into the next vanishing moment

I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous. (The Blue Bouquet)

Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.

Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aun las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.

A TODOS, en algún momento, se nos ha revelado nuestra existencia como algo particular, intransferible y precioso. Casi siempre esta revelación se sitúa en la adolescencia. El descubrimiento de nosotros mismos se manifiesta como un sabernos solos; entre el mundo y nosotros se abre una impalpable, transparente muralla: la de nuestra conciencia.

La lectura es libertad y el lector, al leer, reinventa aquello mismo que lee; participa así en la creación universal.

Tal vez amar es aprender a caminar por este mundo

To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile

La historia tiene la realidad atroz de una pesadilla; la grandeza del hombre consiste en hacer obras hermosas y durables con la sustancia real de esa pesadilla.

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. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.

a silent concave of puppet buffoons neither eagles nor jaguars buzzard lawyers locuses wings of ink sawing mindibles ventriloquist coyotes peddlers of shadows beneficent satraps the cacomistle thief of hens the monument to the Rattle and its snake the altar to the mauser and the machete the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement

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

Entre el lenguaje, ser por naturaleza social, y el escritor, que sólo engendra en la soledad, se establece así una relación muy extraña: gracias al escritor el lenguaje amorfo, horizontal, se yergue e individualiza; gracias al lenguaje, el escritor moderno, rotas las otras vías de comunicación con su pueblo y su tiempo, participa en la vida de la Ciudad.

Si la soledad del mexicano es la de las aguas estancadas, la del norteamericano es la del espejo. Hemos dejado de ser fuentes.

How to speak, oh Dream, your silence out loud?