The voices / 47 fragments

Octavio Paz

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01Undated

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

Octavio Paz / quote

02Undated

This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Octavio Paz / quote

03Undated

Mineral cactai,quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,the bird that punctures space,thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind.The pines taught me to talk to myself.In that garden I learnedto send myself off.Later there were no gardens.

Octavio Paz / quote

04Undated

because two bodies, naked and entwined,leap over time, they are invulnerable,nothing can touch them, they return to the source,there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,no yesterday, no names, the truth of twoin a single body, a single soul,oh total being...

Octavio Paz / quote

05Undated

To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.

Octavio Paz / quote

06Undated

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

Octavio Paz / quote

07Undated

life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which unlives us and makes us strangers,that invents our face and wears it away

Octavio Paz / quote

08Undated

better the crime,the suicides of lovers, the incest committedby brother and sister like two mirrorsin love with their likeness, better to eatthe poisoned bread, adultery on a bedof ashes, ferocious love, the poisonousvines of delirium, the sodomite who wearsa gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,better to be stoned in the plaza than to turnthe mill that squeezes out the juice of life,that turns eternity into empty hours,minutes into prisons, and time intocopper coins and abstract shit

Octavio Paz / quote

09Undated

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.

Octavio Paz / quote

10Undated

CodaPerhaps to love is to learnto walk through this world.To learn to be silentlike the oak and the linden of the fable.To learn to see.Your glance scattered seeds.It planted a tree. I talkbecause you shake its leaves.

Octavio Paz / quote

11Undated

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

Octavio Paz / quote

12Undated

I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?

Octavio Paz / quote

13Undated

Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.

Octavio Paz / quote

14Undated

There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesThey were the words of the language we now speakPieces that will never come togetherBroken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered

Octavio Paz / quote

15Undated

Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and every phrase is the translation of another sign and another phrase. However, this argument can be turned around without losing any of its validity: all texts are original because every translation is distinctive. Every translation, up to a certain point, is an invention and as such it constitutes a unique text.

Octavio Paz / quote

16Undated

At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

Octavio Paz / quote

17Undated

Everything is language.

Octavio Paz / quote

18Undated

A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet…, even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end—it too fades away to nothingness.

Octavio Paz / quote

19Undated

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.

Octavio Paz / quote

20Undated

Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.

Octavio Paz / quote

21Undated

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

Octavio Paz / quote

22Undated

I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.("The Blue Bouquet")

Octavio Paz / quote

23Undated

I went to the little window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the breathing of the night, feminine, enormous.

Octavio Paz / quote

24Undated

The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.

Octavio Paz / quote