The Poetry of Pablo Neruda Quotes

“You make me thank god for every mistake I ever made, Because each one led me down the path that brought me to you.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“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.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“The Truth is in the prolouge.
Death to the romantic fool.,
the expert in solitary confinement.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“My eyes were consumed by your loveliness, but you have become my eyes.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Die Slowly' by Pablo Neruda:
He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“What's wrong with you? I look at you
and I find nothing in you but two eyes
like all eyes, a mouth
lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,
a body just like those that have slipped
beneath my body without leaving any memory.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Fear envelops bones like new skin,
envelops blood with night’s skin,
the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet -
it is not your hair but the terror in your head,
like long hair made of vertical nails,
and what you see are not shattered streets,
but rather, within you, your own crushed walls,
your frustrated infinity, again the city comes
crashing down: in your silence, only water’s threat
is heard, and in the water
drowned horses gallop through your death.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Woman, I would have been your child, to drink the milk of your breasts as from a well, to see and feel you at my side and have you in your gold laughter and your crystal voice.

To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by
to emerge in the stanza-cleansed of all evil.

How I would love you woman, how I would love you, love you as no one ever did!
Die and still
love you more.
And still
love you more
and more.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“My love has two lifetimes to love you. That’s how I can love you when I don’t, and still love you when I do.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“I remember only a day
that was perhaps never intended for me,
it was an incessant day,
without origins, Thursday.
I was a man transported by chance
with a woman vaguely found,
we undressed
as if to die or swim or grow old
and we thrust ourselves one inside the other,
she surrounding me like a hole,
I cracking her like a bell,
for she was the sound that wounded me
and the hard dome determined to tremble.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Naked, you are blue as the night in Cuba;
You have vines and stars in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“I adore my own lost being, my imperfect substance”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Some poems survive it to become poems in another language,” he argued, “but others refuse to live in any language but their own, in which case the translator can manage no more than a reproduction, an effigy, of the original.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Love, love, until the night collapses”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Did the loneliness die that night?
Or was I born then, of my solitude?”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“I ask permission to be like everybody else, like the rest of the world and what’s more, like anybody else: I beg you, with all my heart, if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me, please resist blasting the trumpet during my visit and resign yourselves to my quiet absence.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“despite the mute coldness of the teeth and the hatred of the eyes,
and the battle of dying beasts that watch over oblivion,
in some summer place we are together
watching with lips invaded by thirst.

—Pablo Neruda, from “II: FURIES AND SORROWS,” The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005)”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteror through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
and deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you—compact and planetary,

— Pablo Neruda, from Love Sonnet “XVI,” One Hundred Love Sonnets, trans. Stephen Tapscott, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, ed. Ilan Stavans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005)”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

— Pablo Neruda, from “XIV [Every day you play with the light of the universe.],” Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, ed. Ilan Stavans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003)”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Noćas bi mogao napisati veoma tužne stihove.
Napisati, na primjer: "Noć je osuta zvijezdama
i drhte, plava, nebeska svjetla u daljini.

Ponoćni vjetar kruži nebom i pjeva.

Noćas bi mogao napisati veoma tužne stihove.
Volio sam je, a katkada - i ona je mene voljela.

u noćima ko što je ova držah je u svom naručju.
Ljubio sam je toliko puta pod beskrajnim nebom.

Ona me voljela, i ja nju sam katkada volio,
a kako i ne bih ljubio njene velike mirne oči.

Noćas bi mogao napisati veoma tužne stihove.
Misliti da je nemam. Osjetiti da sam je izgubio.

Čuti beskrajnu noć, još beskrajniju bez nje.
A stih pada na dušu kao na pašnjak rosa.

Što znači da je moja ljubav nije mogla sačuvati.
Noć je osuta zvijezdama i ona nije uz mene.

To je sve, U daljini neko pjeva. U daljini.
Moja se duša ne može pomiriti da sam je izgubio.

Moj pogled je traži, kao da je želi približiti.
Moje srce je traži, a ona nije uz mene.

Ista noć bjelinom ovija ista stabla,
a mi, oni od nekad, više nismo isti.”
― Pablo Neruda, Pjesme / Poemas

“Alliance (Sonata) "

Of dusty glances fallen to the ground
or of soundless leaves burying themselves.
Of metals without light, with the emptiness,
with the absence of the suddenly dead day.
At the tip of the hands the dazzlement of butterflies,
the upflight of butterflies whose light has no end.

You kept the trail of light, of broken beings
that the abandoned sun, sinking, casts at the churches.
Stained with glances, dealing with bees,
your substance fleeing from unexpected flame
precedes and follows the day and its family of gold.

The spying days cross in secret
but they fall within your voice of light.
Oh mistress of love, in your rest
I established my dream, my silent attitude.

With your body of timid number, suddenly extended
to the quantities that define the earth,
behind the struggle of the days white with space
and cold with slow deaths and withered stimuli,
I feel your lap burn and your kisses travel
shaping fresh swallows in my sleep.

At times the destiny of your tears ascends
like age to my forehead, there
the waves are crashing, smashing themselves to death:
their movement is moist, drifting, ultimate.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“DO NOT ASK ME Some people ask me that human affairs with names, surnames, and laments not be dealt with in the pages of my books, not to give them space in my verses: they say poetry died here, some say I should not do it: the truth is I do not want to please them. I greet them, I tip my hat to them, and I leave them voyaging in Parnassus like happy rats in cheese. I belong to another category, I am only a man of flesh and bones, therefore if they beat my brother I defend him with what I have in hand and each one of my lines carries the threat of gunpowder or steel, that will fall over the inhuman, over the cruel and over the arrogant. But the punishment of my furious peace”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Pamtim kakva si bila one posljednje jeseni..”
― Pablo Neruda, Pjesme / Poemas

“Hoću da uradim s tobom
ono što proljeće radi s trešnjama.”
― Pablo Neruda, Pjesme

“Pamtim kakva si bila one posljednje jeseni.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda