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Selected Poems Quotes
Selected Poems
by
Octavio Paz443 ratings, 4.19 average rating, 31 reviews
Selected Poems Quotes
Showing 1-18 of 18
“Two Bodies"
Two bodies face to face
are at times two waves
and night is an ocean.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two stones
and night a desert.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two roots
laced into night.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two knives
and night strikes sparks.
Two bodies face to face
are two stars falling
in an empty sky.”
― Selected Poems
Two bodies face to face
are at times two waves
and night is an ocean.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two stones
and night a desert.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two roots
laced into night.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two knives
and night strikes sparks.
Two bodies face to face
are two stars falling
in an empty sky.”
― Selected Poems
“After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.”
― Selected Poems
― Selected Poems
“I am the shadow my words cast,”
― Selected Poems
― Selected Poems
“There was only one huge world with no back to it
A world like a sun
One day it broke into tiny pieces
They were the words of the language we now speak
Pieces that will never come together
Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered”
― Selected Poems
A world like a sun
One day it broke into tiny pieces
They were the words of the language we now speak
Pieces that will never come together
Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered”
― Selected Poems
“Sound, the blindman's cane of sense:
I write death and for a moment
I live within it. I inhabit its sound:
a pneumatic cube of glass,
vibrating on this page,
vanishing among its echoes.”
― Selected Poems
I write death and for a moment
I live within it. I inhabit its sound:
a pneumatic cube of glass,
vibrating on this page,
vanishing among its echoes.”
― Selected Poems
“In my house there were more dead than living.
My mother, a thousand-year-old girl,
mother of the world, my orphan,
self-sacrificing, ferocious, stubborn, provident,
titmouse, bitch, ant, wild boar,
love letter with spelling mistakes;
my mother: bread I'd slice
with her own knife each day.”
― Selected Poems
My mother, a thousand-year-old girl,
mother of the world, my orphan,
self-sacrificing, ferocious, stubborn, provident,
titmouse, bitch, ant, wild boar,
love letter with spelling mistakes;
my mother: bread I'd slice
with her own knife each day.”
― Selected Poems
“Good, we wanted good:
to set the world right.
We didn't lack integrity:
we lacked humility.
What we wanted was not innocently wanted.
Precepts and concepts,
the arrogance of theologians,
to beat with a cross,
to institute with blood,
to build the house with bricks of crime,
to declare obligatory communion.
Some
became secretaries to the secretary
to the General Secretary of the Inferno.”
― Selected Poems
to set the world right.
We didn't lack integrity:
we lacked humility.
What we wanted was not innocently wanted.
Precepts and concepts,
the arrogance of theologians,
to beat with a cross,
to institute with blood,
to build the house with bricks of crime,
to declare obligatory communion.
Some
became secretaries to the secretary
to the General Secretary of the Inferno.”
― Selected Poems
“The brains are stained with ink
The doctors dispute in a den of thieves
The businessmen
fast hands slow thoughts
officiate in the graveyard
The dialecticians exalt the subtlety of the rope”
― Selected Poems
The doctors dispute in a den of thieves
The businessmen
fast hands slow thoughts
officiate in the graveyard
The dialecticians exalt the subtlety of the rope”
― Selected Poems
“are they nothing at all, the cries of men?
does nothing happen in time but time passing?
-nothing happens, only the flickering eyelid
of the great sun, hardly a movement, nothing,
the unredeemable boundaries of time,
the dead are all pinned down by their own dying,
they cannot die again of another death,
they are untouchable, locked in their gestures,
and since their solitude and since their dying
this only they can do: stare sightless at us,
their death is simply the statue of their life,
perpetual being and nothingness without end,
for every moment is nothing without end,
a king of fantasy regulates your pulse
and your last gesture carves an impassive mask
and lays that sculpture over your mobile face:
we are the monument raised to an alien
life, a life unlived, not lively, hardly ours.”
― Selected Poems
does nothing happen in time but time passing?
-nothing happens, only the flickering eyelid
of the great sun, hardly a movement, nothing,
the unredeemable boundaries of time,
the dead are all pinned down by their own dying,
they cannot die again of another death,
they are untouchable, locked in their gestures,
and since their solitude and since their dying
this only they can do: stare sightless at us,
their death is simply the statue of their life,
perpetual being and nothingness without end,
for every moment is nothing without end,
a king of fantasy regulates your pulse
and your last gesture carves an impassive mask
and lays that sculpture over your mobile face:
we are the monument raised to an alien
life, a life unlived, not lively, hardly ours.”
― Selected Poems
“whenever two people kiss the world is born,
a drop of light with guts of transparency
the room like a fruit splits and begins to open
or burst like a star among the silences
and all laws now rat-gnawed and eaten away,
barred windows of banks and penitentiaries,
the bars of paper, and the barbed-wire fences,
the stamps and the seals, the sharp prongs and the spurs,
the one-note sermon of the bombs and wars,
the gentle scorpion in his cap and gown,
the tiger who is the president of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty and the Red Cross,
the pedagogical ass, and the crocodile
set up as saviour, father of his country,
the founder, the leader, the shark, the architect
of the future of us all, the hog in uniform,
and then that one, the favourite son of the Church
who can be seen brushing his black teeth
in holy water and taking evening courses
in English and democracy, the invisible
barriers, the mad and decaying masks
that are used to separate us, man from man,
and man from his own self
they are thrown down
for an enormous instant and we see darkly
our own lost unity, how vulnerable it is
to be women and men, the glory it is to be man
and share our bread and share our sun and our death,
the dark forgotten marvel of being alive;”
― Selected Poems
a drop of light with guts of transparency
the room like a fruit splits and begins to open
or burst like a star among the silences
and all laws now rat-gnawed and eaten away,
barred windows of banks and penitentiaries,
the bars of paper, and the barbed-wire fences,
the stamps and the seals, the sharp prongs and the spurs,
the one-note sermon of the bombs and wars,
the gentle scorpion in his cap and gown,
the tiger who is the president of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty and the Red Cross,
the pedagogical ass, and the crocodile
set up as saviour, father of his country,
the founder, the leader, the shark, the architect
of the future of us all, the hog in uniform,
and then that one, the favourite son of the Church
who can be seen brushing his black teeth
in holy water and taking evening courses
in English and democracy, the invisible
barriers, the mad and decaying masks
that are used to separate us, man from man,
and man from his own self
they are thrown down
for an enormous instant and we see darkly
our own lost unity, how vulnerable it is
to be women and men, the glory it is to be man
and share our bread and share our sun and our death,
the dark forgotten marvel of being alive;”
― Selected Poems
“It hovers, creeps in, comes close, withdraws, turns on tiptoe and, if I reach out my hand, disappears: a Word. I can only make out its proud crest: Cri. Cricket, Cripple, Crime, Crimea, Critic, Crisis, Criterion? A canoe sails from my forehead carrying a man armed with a spear. The light, fragile boat nimbly cuts the black waves, the swells of black blood in my temples. It moves further inward. The hunter-fisherman studies the shaded, cloudy mass of a horizon full of threats; he sinks his keen eyes into the rancorous foam, he perks his head and listens, he sniffs. At times a bright flash crosses the darkness, a green and scaly flutter. It is Cri, who leaps for a second into the air, breathes, and submerges again in the depths. The hunter blows the horn he carries strapped to his chest, but its mournful bellow is lost in the desert of water. There is no one on the great salt lake. And the rocky beach is far off, far from the faint lights from the huts of his companions. From time to time Cri reappears, shows his fatal fin, and sinks again. The oarsman, fascinated, follows him inward, each time further inward.”
― Selected Poems
― Selected Poems
