The Essential Neruda Quotes

“Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“October Fullness”

Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried
my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
The best thing was learning not to have too much
either of sorrow or of joy,
to hope for the chance of a last drop,
to ask more from honey and from twilight.

Perhaps it was my punishment.
Perhaps I was condemned to be happy.
Let it be known that nobody
crossed my path without sharing my being.
I plunged up to the neck
into adversities that were not mine,
into all the sufferings of others.
It wasn’t a question of applause or profit.
Much less. It was not being able
to live or breathe in this shadow,
the shadow of others like towers,
like bitter trees that bury you,
like cobblestones on the knees.

Our own wounds heal with weeping,
our own wounds heal with singing,
but in our own doorway lie bleeding
widows, Indians, poor men, fishermen.
The miner’s child doesn’t know his father
amidst all that suffering.

So be it, but my business
was
the fullness of the spirit:
a cry of pleasure choking you,
a sigh from an uprooted plant,
the sum of all action.

It pleased me to grow with the morning,
to bathe in the sun, in the great joy
of sun, salt, sea-light and wave,
and in that unwinding of the foam
my heart began to move,
growing in that essential spasm,
and dying away as it seeped into the sand.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks"

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Only with kisses and red poppies can I love you,
with rain-soaked wreaths,
contemplating ashen horses and yellow dogs.
Only with waves at my back can I love you,
between dull explosions of brimstone and reflective waters,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming across submerged hearts
and faded lists of unburied children.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“The Potter

Your whole body is
A glass of wine
Or sweetness destined for me.
When I raise my hand,
I find in every place a dove
Seeking for me,
As if, my love,
You were made of clay
For my very hands of a potter.
Your knees, your breasts,
Your waist,
Disappear in me like in a hollow
Of a thirsting earth
Where they lose
A form,
And together
We become like a single river,
Like a single grain of sand.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Te amo sin saber como, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
asi te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“XXVII"

Naked, you are simple as a hand,
smooth, earthy, small...transparent, round.
You have moon lines and apple paths;
Naked, you are slender as the wheat.

Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color,
Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As a summer's wholeness in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as your fingernail;
Subtle and curved in the rose-colored dawn
And you withdraw to the underground world

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“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, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“My love, suddenly
your hip
is the curve of the wineglass
filled to the brim,
your breast is the cluster,
your hair the light of alcohol,
your nipples, the grapes
your navel pure seal
stamped on your barrel of a belly,
and your love the cascade
of unquenchable wine,
the brightness that falls on my senses,
the earthen splendor of life.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“And the heart sounds like a sour conch,
calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,
scattered in the unlucky and disheveled waves:
the sea reports sonorously
on its languid shadows, its green poppies.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Ours is a lank country
and on the naked edge of her knife
our frail flag burns.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Book
beautiful
book,
miniscule forest,
leaf
after leaf
your paper smells
of the elements. . . .”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“..her eyes were the color of faraway love
her arms were matching topazes
her lips moved soundlessly in the coral light
and ultimately, she left by the door..”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Little by little, and also in great leaps,
life happened to me,
and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried
my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places
without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“I am hungry for your silken laughter,
For your hands the color of savage harvest,
Hungry for the pail stones of your fingernails.
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

from “Love Sonnet XI”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Every Day You Play"

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

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.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“And that's how it was, that night,
shadow and space, earth
and time,
something that runs and falls
and passes.
And that's how all the nights
go over the earth,
leaving only a vague
black odor.
A leaf falls,
a drop
on the earth
muffles its sound,
the forest sleeps, the waters,
the meadows,
the bells,
the eyes.

I hear you and you breathe,
my love,
we sleep.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,
and let my obedience align itself with such iron
      conditions
that the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shake
the deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.”
― Mark Eisner, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Yalnız bir yer, daha önce söz ettim
bu yapayalnız yerden,
burada toprak okyanusla dolu,
burada kimse yok, yalnızca at izleri,
kimse yok, yalnızca rüzgar,
kimse yok, yalnızca denizin sularına yağan yağmur,
kimse yok, yalnızca denizde artan yağmur.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“el verbo es origen
y vierte vida: es sangre,
es la sangre que expresa su substancia
y está dispuesto así su desarrollo”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“in the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems