Times Alone Quotes

“Look for your other half
Who walks along next to you,
And tends to be what you aren’t.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“I Have Walked Down Many Roads
by Antonio Machado
translated from the Spanish by Don Share


I have walked down many roads
and cleared many paths;
I have navigated a hundred oceans
and anchored off a hundred shores.

All over, I have seen
caravans of sadness,
pompous and melancholy men
drunk with black shadows,

and defrocked pedants
who stare, keep quiet, and think
they know, because they don’t
drink wine in the neighborhood bars.

Bad people who go around
polluting the earth . . .

And all over, I have seen
people who dance or play,
when they can, and work
their four handfuls of land.

If they turn up someplace,
they never ask where they are.

When they travel, they ride
on the backs of old mules,

and don’t know how to hurry,
not even on holidays.

When there’s wine, they drink wine;
when there’s no wine, they drink cool water.

These are good people, who live,
work, get by, and dream;
and on a day like all the others
they lie down under the earth.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“No my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“Like an abandoned dog who cannot find
a smell or a track and roams
along the roads, with no road, like
the child who in a night of the fair

gets lost among the crowd,
and the air is dusty, and the candles
fluttering,--astounded, his heart

weighed down by music and by pain;
that’s how I am, drunk, sad by nature,
a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet,
and an ordinary man lost in dreams,
searching constantly for God among the mists.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“I thought my fire was out,
and stirred the ashes….
I burnt my fingers.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“The eye you see is not an eye because you see it;
it is an eye because it sees you.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“While the burning fish is tracing his arc
near the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all,
and the blind boy flies away in the white stone,
and the ivory poem of the green cicada
beats and reverberates in the elm,
let us give honor to the Lord—
the black mark of his good hand—
who has arranged for silence in all this noise.

Honor to the god of distance and of absence,
ff the anchor in the sea—the open sea…
He frees us from the world—it’s everywhere—
he opens roads for us to walk on.

With our cup of darkness filled to the brim,
with our heart that always knows some hunger,
let us give honor to the Lord who created the zero
and carved our thought out of the block of faith.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems

“When the I AM THAT I AM made nothing
And rested, which rest it certainly deserved,
Night now accompanied day, and man
Had his friend in the absence of the woman.”
― Antonio Machado, Times Alone: Selected Poems