Quotes from Pablo Neruda

A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory.

How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence...

Our love was bornoutside the walls, in the wind, in the night, in the earth, and that's why the clay and the flower, the mud and the rootsknow your name.

If each day falls inside each night, there exists a well where clarity is imprisoned. We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness and fish for fallen light with patience.

Only a burning patience will lead to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

Poetry is an act of peace.

Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit.

Look around—there's only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.

The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.

In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.

It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

Laughter is the language of the soul.

Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.

O merry, merry, merry, like only dogs know how to be happy and nothing more, with an absolute shameless nature.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body... and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Only do not forget, if I wake up crying it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands.