“An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.”
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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.
“
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More quotes by Octavio Paz
“Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.”
“An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.”
“Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.”
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