Quotes from Pablo Neruda

Para mi corazón basta tu pecho, para tu libertad bastan mis alas.»

Neither the heart cut by a sliver of glass in a wasteland of thorns, nor the atrocious waters seen in the corners of certain houses, waters like eyelids and eyes, could hold your waist in my hands when my heart lifts its oak trees toward your unbreakable thread of snow.   Night sugar, spirit of crowns, redeemed human blood, your kisses banish me, and a surge of water with remnants of the sea strikes the silences that wait for you surrounding the worn-out chairs, wearing doors away.

What weighs more heavily on the belt, sadness or memories? Where is the child I was, still inside me or gone? Why did we spend so much time growing up only to separate? Was it where they lost me that I finally found myself?

A quién le puedo preguntar Qué vine a hacer en este mundo? Por qué me muevo sin querer, Por qué no puedo estar inmóvil? Por qué voy rodando sin ruedas, Volando sin alas ni plumas? Y qué me dio por trasmigrar Si viven en Chile mis huesos?

In you the wars and the flights accumulated, From you the wings of the songbirds rose.

Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrows loosens into the night the petals that form your form let your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladder rung by rung taking off with me in my dream. I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows. Dark is the world's night without you my love

With a kiss you'll know all I've kept quiet.

Por que en las epocas oscuras se escribe con tinta invisible? Why in the darkest ages do they write with invisible ink?

Madre de piedra, espuma de los cóndores. Alto arrecife de la aurora humana. Pala perdida en la primera arena.

But my words become stained with your love. You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

The street heaves and winds, burns and bumps, but behind the glass the locksmith, the old curator of timepieces, stands motionless with a single protruding eye, one amazing eye which peers into the mystery, the secret hearts of clocks, and looks deeply in until the elusive butterfly of time in its measure is trapped in his forehead and the wings of the watch beat. -from To Don Asterio Alarcón, Clocksmith of Valparaíso

I could not walk except with you, ...I could not sing except when you sing.

I asked of every thing if it had something more, something more than shape and form, and I learned that way that nothing is empty-- everything is a box, a train, a boat loaded with implications, every foot that walked along a path left a telegram written in the stone, and clothes in the washing water dripped out their whole existence. -from Investigations

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. "Si cada día cae/If each day falls EI MAR Y LAS CAMPANAS. The Sea and The Bells.

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being. Pablo Neruda's epitaph for Tina Modotti

How did the abandoned bicycle win its freedom?

because in that moment you'll have gone so far I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking, Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

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

Y algo golpeaba en mi alma, fiebre o alas perdidas, y me fui haciendo solo, descifrando aquella quemadura y escribí la primera línea vaga, vaga, sin cuerpo, pura, tontería pura sabiduría del que no sabe nada, y vi de pronto el cielo desgranado y abierto.

Le déracinement pour l'être humain est une frustration qui, d'une manière ou d'une autre, atrophie la clarté de son âme.

Quiero saltar al agua para caer al cielo. (Agua dormida)

I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.

Quiero vivir en un mundo en el que los seres sean solamente humanos, sin darse en la cabeza con una regla, con una palabr, con una etiqueta... Quiero que la gran mayoría, la única mayoría, todos, puedan hablar, leer, escuchar, florecer. No entendí nunca la lucha sino para que ésta termine.

Y aquella vez fue como nunca y siempre: vamos allí donde no espera nada y hallamos todo lo que está esperando.