"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"Te amo como se aman ciertas cosa oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
(I love you as certain darks things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)"
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

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."
— Pablo Neruda

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
— Pablo Neruda (Love: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda)

"Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:

where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. "
— Pablo Neruda

"I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

"Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life"
— Pablo Neruda

"I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too."
— Pablo Neruda

"But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me."
— Pablo Neruda

"Laughter is the language of the soul."
— Pablo Neruda

"It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me"
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

"XV

We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor)

"Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us"
— Pablo Neruda

"You are like nobody since I love you"
— Pablo Neruda

"...I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. "
— Pablo Neruda

"And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us."
— Pablo Neruda

"Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land
"
— Pablo Neruda (Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems)

"We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"" To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.""
— Pablo Neruda

"XVII

The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"I got lost in the night, without the light
of your eyelids, and when the night surrounded me
I was born again: I was the owner of my own darkness."
— Pablo Neruda

"Love is the mystery of water and a star."
— Pablo Neruda

"Love! Love until the night collapses!"
— Pablo Neruda (Machu Picchu)

"If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive"
— Pablo Neruda

"Quiero que sepas
una cosa.

Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado."
— Pablo Neruda

"If suddenly you do not exist,
If suddenly you are not living,
I shall go on living.

I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.

I shall go on living."
— Pablo Neruda

"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."
— Pablo Neruda

"In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?"
— Pablo Neruda (Book of Questions)

"Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps."
— Pablo Neruda

"In this part of the story I am the one who
dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor)

"and that's why i have to go back
to so many places
there to find myself
and constantly examine myself
with no witness but the moon
and then whistle with joy,
ambling over rocks and clods of earth,
with no task but to live,
with no family but the road."
— Pablo Neruda

"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."
— Pablo Neruda

"Give me silence, water, hope
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes"
— Pablo Neruda

"Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. "
— Pablo Neruda

""Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying...and every day on the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like morning." "
— Pablo Neruda

"Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido."
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

"my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living."
— Pablo Neruda

"I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to no one,
stretch myself over the world,
over roofs and landscapes,
with a passionate desire
to hunt the rats in my dreams."
— Pablo Neruda

"XVI

Each intheh most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few,the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"Give me, for my life,
all lives,
give me all the pain
of everyone,
I'm going to turn it into hope.
Give me
all the joys,
even the most secret,
because otherwise
how will these things be known?
I have to tell them,
give me
the labors
of everyday,
for that's what I sing"
— Pablo Neruda

""Give me your hand
out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.""
— Pablo Neruda

"Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?"
— Pablo Neruda

"As if you were on fire from within.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin."
— Pablo Neruda

"And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture."
— Pablo Neruda

"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...."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor)

"I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;...

...so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

and:

because love cannot always fly without resting,
our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:
our kisses head back home where they belong.

and:

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness

Luckily I got over the phase where I copied tragic poetry into notecards to express my unrequited passions. Now I've moved on to mix CDs. I swear, I'm a caricature even of myself. Emo mommy. Pardon me while I don a pirate blouse and walk moodily across the moors on a stormy day.

Pablo, however, is lovely.(less)"
— Pablo Neruda

"While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone."
— Pablo Neruda

"Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning. "
— Pablo Neruda

"You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me."
— Pablo Neruda