Octavio Paz

“Каждый читатель - тот же поэт, каждое стихотворение - любое другое. Ни минуты не стоя на месте, поэзия никуда не спешит. В разговоре каждая фраза предвосхищает следующую: у этой цепи есть на...”

“Стихи нельзя объяснить - только понять.”

“У влюбленного в безмолвие поэта есть одно спасение - речь.”

“Возвращение «Земную жизнь пройдя до половины», остановился я. И повернулся спиною к будущему: «там не ждут меня» - и пройденным уже путем пошел. Я вышел вон из ряда тех, кто испокон веков, о...”

“Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.”

“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 alw...”

“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. I...”

“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,...”

“better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn the mill that squeezes out the juice of life, that turns eternity into empty hours, minutes into prisons, and time into copper coins and abstrac...”

“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 unrede...”

“The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated f...”

“Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice...”

“All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.”

“Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.”

“In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.”

“Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.”

“In antiquity, a woman might be an object of worship or desire, but never of love.”

“Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to be...”

“For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the c...”

“Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican li...”