Octavio Paz Quotes

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Deserve your dream.
Octavio Paz
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Octavio Paz
Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.
Octavio Paz (The Collected Poems, 1957-1987)
I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.
Octavio Paz (An Erotic Beyond: Sade)
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 two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being...
Octavio Paz (Sunstone/Piedra De Sol)
No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.
Octavio Paz
Merece lo que sueñas.
Octavio Paz (Libertad bajo palabra)
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
Octavio Paz
It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
To love is to undress our names.
Octavio Paz
Ser uno mismo es, siempre, llegar a ser ese otro que somos y que llevamos escondido en nuestro interior, más que nada como promesa o posibilidad de ser.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
Octavio Paz
a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.
Octavio Paz
...que busca? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar. ...what is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny. Perhaps his destiny is to search.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad)
Una civilización que niega a la muerte, acaba por negar a la vida.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
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 (The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry)
Las masas humanas más peligrosas son aquellas en cuyas venas ha sido inyectado el veneno del miedo… del miedo al cambio
Octavio Paz
All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can’t be touched.
Octavio Paz
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 (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom.
Octavio Paz
Dime cómo mueres y te diré quien eres.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.
Octavio Paz
Without democracy freedom is a chimera
Octavio Paz (Libertad bajo palabra)
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
Octavio Paz (Alternating Current)
listen to me as one listens to the rain, the years go by, the moments return, do you hear the footsteps in the next room? not here, not there: you hear them in another time that is now, listen to the footsteps of time, inventor of places with no weight, nowhere, listen to the rain running over the terrace, the night is now more night in the grove, lightning has nestled among the leaves, a restless garden adrift-go in, your shadow covers this page.
Octavio Paz
Si las revoluciones no se hacen con palabras, las ideas no se implantan con decretos.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
Octavio Paz
Two bodies face to face Are at times two waves And the night is an ocean. Two bodies face to face Are sometimes two stones And the night a desert.
Octavio Paz
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 (A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems)
Mil cosas solicitan a la vez nuestra atención y ninguna de ellas logra retenernos; así la vida se nos vuelve arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro.
Octavio Paz
Everything is language.
Octavio Paz (The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History (Texas Pan American Series))
Sentirse solo no es sentirse inferior, sino distinto. El sentimiento de soledad no es una ilusión —como a veces lo es el de inferioridad— sino la expresión de un hecho real: somos, de verdad, distintos. Y, de verdad, estamos solos.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Bodies are visible hieroglyphs. Every body is an erotic metaphor, and the meaning of all these metaphors is always the same: death.
Octavio Paz
Coda Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world. To learn to be silent like the oak and the linden of the fable. To learn to see. Your glance scattered seeds. It planted a tree. I talk because you shake its leaves.
Octavio Paz
El amor es intensidad y por esto es una distensión del tiempo: estira los minutos y los alarga como siglos.
Octavio Paz
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 (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
Octavio Paz
Pues apenas el tiempo se divide en ayer, hoy y mañana, en horas, minutos y segundos, el hombre cesa de ser uno con el tiempo, cesa de coincidir con el fluir de la realidad.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad: Postdata/Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
En lugar de interrogarnos a nosotros mismos,¿no sería mejor crear, obrar sobre una realidad que no se entrega al que la contempla, sino al que es capaz de sumergirse en ella?
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
The past reappears because it is a hidden present.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
...you are you and your body of steam, you and your face of night, you and your hair, unhurried lightning, you cross the street and enter my forehead, footsteps of water across my eyes, listen to me as one listens to the rain
Octavio Paz (A Tree Within)
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
To become aware of our history is to become aware of our singularity.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
العالم يتغيّر عندما ينظُرُ شخصانِ إلى بعضهما فيجدان نفسَيْهِما
Octavio Paz
La resignación es una de nuestras virtudes populares. Más que el brillo de la victoria nos conmueve la entereza ante la adversidad.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
¿Y no es extraordinario que, desparecidas las causas, persistan los efectos? ¿Y que los efectos oculten a las causas?
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
El mexicano frecuenta a la muerte, la burla, la acaricia, duerme con ella, la festeja, es uno de sus juguetes favoritos y su amor permanente.
Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de la Soledad)
life is other, always there, further off, beyond you and beyond me, always on the horizon, life which unlives us and makes us strangers, that invents our face and wears it away
Octavio Paz (Sunstone/Piedra De Sol)
Mato de hambre al amor, para que devore lo que encuentre.
Octavio Paz (¿Águila o Sol?)
al entrar en ti mismo no sales del mundo
Octavio Paz (A Tree Within)
[Eroticism is] the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear, it meanders and twists back on itself, shows us what we do not see with our eyes, but in the eyes of our spirit. Eroticism reveals to us another world, inside this world. The senses become servants of the imagination, and let us see the invisible and hear the inaudible.
Octavio Paz
I heard my blood, singing in its prison, and the sea sang with a murmur of light, one by one the walls gave way, all of the doors were broken down, and the sun came bursting through my forehead, it tore apart my closed lids, cut loose my being from its wrappers, and pulled me out of myself to wake me from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone
Octavio Paz (Sunstone/Piedra De Sol)
History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality--if only for an instant--by means of creation.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Nuestra muerte ilumina nuestra vida. Si nuestra muerte carece de sentido, tampoco lo tuvo nuestra vida. Por eso cuando alguien muere de muerte violenta, solemos decir: "se la buscó". Y es cierto, cada quien tiene la muerte que se busca, la muerte que se ] Si la muerte nos traiciona y morimos de mala manera, todos se lamentan: hay que morir como se vive. La muerte es intransferible, como la vida. Si no morimos como vivimos es porque realmente no fue nuestra vida que vivimos: no nos pertenecía como no nos pertenece la mala suerte que nos mata. Dime cómo mueres y te diré quién eres.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Los ojos se cierran, las palabras se abren.
Octavio Paz (The Collected Poems, 1957-1987)
Reality is always at the edge of the abyss, hung from the thread of a thought.
Octavio Paz (A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems)
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 (The Blue Bouquet)
The Bridge Between now and now, between I am and you are, the word bridge. Entering it you enter yourself: the world connects and closes like a ring. From one bank to another, there is always a body stretched: a rainbow. I'll sleep beneath its arches.
Octavio Paz
oh life to live, life already lived, time that comes back in a swell of sea, time that recedes without turning its head, the past is not past, it is still passing by, flowing silently into the next vanishing moment
Octavio Paz (Sunstone/Piedra De Sol)
Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aun las más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
La lectura es libertad y el lector, al leer, reinventa aquello mismo que lee; participa así en la creación universal.
Octavio Paz (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o Las trampas de la fe)
I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. Yes, the excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into—what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name…
Octavio Paz (In Light Of India)
like a mountain path that ends at a cliff I travel along the edge of your thoughts, and my shadow falls from your white forehead, my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces and go with no body, groping my way
Octavio Paz (Sunstone/Piedra De Sol)
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
La palabra del hombre es hija de la muerte. Hablamos porque somos mortales: las palabras no son signos. Son años. Al decir lo que dicen los nombres que decimos dicen tiempo: nos dicen, somos hombres del tiempo. Conversar es humano.
Octavio Paz
He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
¿Y no es extraordinario que, desaparecidas las causas, persistan los efectos? ¿Y que los efectos oculten a las causas?
Octavio Paz
La historia tiene la realidad atroz de una pesadilla; la grandeza del hombre consiste en hacer obras hermosas y durables con la sustancia real de esa pesadilla.
Octavio Paz
Tal vez amar es aprender a caminar por este mundo
Octavio Paz (Mexican Poetry: An Anthology)
To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile,
Octavio Paz (The Double Flame: Essays on Love & Eroticism)
Mil cosas solicitan a la vez nuestra atención y ninguna de ellas logra retenernos; así la vida se nos vuelve arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro.
Octavio Paz Solórzano
Si la soledad del mexicano es la de las aguas estancadas, la del norteamericano es la del espejo. Hemos dejado de ser fuentes.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
...Hay 3 clases de amistad: por interés o utilidad, por placer y la "amistad perfecta, la de los hombres de bien y semejantes en virtud, porque éstos se desean igualmente el bien".
Octavio Paz
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
...it becomes clear that chronometric time is a homogeneous succession lacking all particularity. It is always the same, always indifferent to pleasure or pain. Mythological time, on the other hand, is impregnated with all the particulars of our lives: it is as long as eternity or as short as a breath, ominous or propitious, fecund or sterile.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
In this pilgrimage in search of modernity I lost my way at many points only to find myself again. I returned to the source and discovered that modernity is not outside but within us. It is today and the most ancient antiquity; it is tomorrow and the beginning of the world; it is a thousand years old and yet newborn. It speaks in Nahuatl, draws Chinese ideograms from the 9th century, and appears on the television screen. This intact present, recently unearthed, shakes off the dust of centuries, smiles and suddenly starts to fly, disappearing through the window. A simultaneous plurality of time and presence: modernity breaks with the immediate past only to recover an age-old past and transform a tiny fertility figure from the neolithic into our contemporary. We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.
Octavio Paz
Eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings. The first thing that distinguishes eroticism from sexuality is the infinite variety of forms in which it manifests itself. eroticism is invention, constant variation, sex is always the same. In every erotic encounter there is an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire.Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. Many years ago I wrote: love is a sacrifice without virtue. Today I would say: love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own: the freedom of the other.
Octavio Paz
Es indudable que hoy se lee más que antes. ¿Se lee mejor? Lo dudo. La distracción es nuestro estado habitual. No la distracción del que se aleja del mundo para internarse en el secreto y movedizo país de su fantasía, sino la de aquel que está siempre fuera de sí, perdido en la mediocre e insensata agitación cotidiana. Mil cosas solicitan a la vez nuestra atención y ninguna de ellas logra retenernos; así la vida se nos vuelve arena entre los dedos y las horas humo en el cerebro.
Octavio Paz
Between going and staying the day wavers, in love with its own transparency. The circular afternoon is now a bay where the world in stillness rocks. All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can't be touched. Paper, book, pencil, glass, rest in the shade of their names. Time throbbing in my temples repeats the same unchanging syllable of blood. The light turns the indifferent wall into a ghostly theater of reflections. I find myself in the middle of an eye, watching myself in its blank stare. The moment scatters. Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause.
Octavio Paz
Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens; the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments; the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page; the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses, for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert; the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self; the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl; the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought; the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands; the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language; the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Octavio Paz
A TODOS, en algún momento, se nos ha revelado nuestra existencia como algo particular, intransferible y precioso. Casi siempre esta revelación se sitúa en la adolescencia. El descubrimiento de nosotros mismos se manifiesta como un sabernos solos; entre el mundo y nosotros se abre una impalpable, transparente muralla: la de nuestra conciencia.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
better the crime, the suicides of lovers, the incest committed by brother and sister like two mirrors in love with their likeness, better to eat the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel, 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 abstract shit
Octavio Paz (Sunstone/Piedra De Sol)
أما الطريق الثاني للخروج فهو طريق الحب: بالرضا والقبول.. بحرية الشخص المحبوب. أهو جنون أم وهم؟ ربما، لكنه الباب الوحيد للخروج من سجن الغيرة. منذ سنوات بعيدة كتبت: الحب تضحية بدون فضيلة، واليوم أقول: الحب رهان أحمق من أجل الحرية، لا حريتي الخاصة، بل حرية الآخر.
Octavio Paz (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism)
Entre el lenguaje, ser por naturaleza social, y el escritor, que sólo engendra en la soledad, se establece así una relación muy extraña: gracias al escritor el lenguaje amorfo, horizontal, se yergue e individualiza; gracias al lenguaje, el escritor moderno, rotas las otras vías de comunicación con su pueblo y su tiempo, participa en la vida de la Ciudad.
Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad / Postdata / Vuelta a "El laberinto de la soledad")
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
o love is to battle, if two kiss the world changes, desires take flesh thoughts take flesh, wings sprout on the backs of the slave, the world is real and tangible, wine is wine, bread regains its savor, water is water, to love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master; the world changes if two look at each other and see Piedra de Sol (The Sun Stone), translated by Eliot Weinberger
Octavio Paz
a silent concave of puppet buffoons neither eagles nor jaguars buzzard lawyers locuses wings of ink sawing mindibles ventriloquist coyotes peddlers of shadows beneficent satraps the cacomistle thief of hens the monument to the Rattle and its snake the altar to the mauser and the machete the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement
Octavio Paz
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
La elección y la exclusividad son condiciones que la amistad comparte con el amor. La amistad nace de la comunidad y de la coincidencia en las ideas, en los sentimientos o en los intereses. El amor nace de un flechazo; la amistad es el intercambio frecuente y prolongado. El amor es instantáneo; la amistad requiere tiempo.
Octavio Paz (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism)
Nuestra historia está llena de frases y episodios que revelan la indiferencia de nuestros héroes ante el dolor o el peligro. Desde niños nos enseñan a sufrir con dignidad las derrotas, concepción que no carece de grandeza. Y si no todos somos estóicos e impasibles –como Juárez y Cuauhtémoc– al menos procuramos ser resignados, pacientes y sufridos. La resignación es una de nuestras virtudes populares. Más que el brillo de la victoria, nos conmueve la entereza ante la adversidad.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
El amor no es eternidad; tampoco es el tiempo sucesivo...Es la percepción instantánea de todos los tiempos en uno solo, de todas las vidas en un instante. ¿Qué ve la pareja, en el espacio de un parpadeo? La identidad de la aparición y la desaparición, la verdad del cuerpo y del no-cuerpo, la visión de la presencia que se disuelve en un esplendor; vivacidad pura, latido del tiempo.
Octavio Paz (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism)
La palabra chingar, con todas estas múltiples significaciones, define gran parte de nuestra vida y califica nuestras relaciones con el resto de nuestros amigos y compatriotas. Para el mexicano la vida es una posibilidad de chingar o ser chingado. Es decir, de humillar, castigar y ofender. O a la inversa. Esta concepción de la vida social como combate engendra fatalmente la división de la sociedad en fuertes y débiles. Los fuertes – los chingones sin escrúpulos, duros e inexorables– se rodean de fidelidades ardientes e interesadas. EL servilismo ante los poderosos – especialmente entre la casta de los "políticos" esto es, de los profesionales de los negocios públicos– es una de las deplorables consecuencias de esta situación . Otra, no menos degradante es la adhesión a las personas y no a los principios. Con frecuencia nuestros políticos confunden los negocios públicos con los privados. No importa. Su riqueza o su influencia en la administración les permite sostener una mesnada que el pueblo llama, muy atinadamente, de "lambiscones" (de lamer).
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
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 (The Blue Bouquet)
Los españoles también abusan de las expresiones fuertes. Frente a ellos el mexicano es singularmente pulcro. Pero mientras los españoles se complacen en la blasfemia y la escatología, nosotros nos especializamos en la crueldad y el sadismo. El español es simple: insulta a Dios porque cree en él. La blasfemia, dice Manchado, es una oración al revés. El placer que experimentan muchos españoles, incluso algunos de sus más altos poetas, al aludir a los detrimentos y mezclar la mierda con lo sagrado se parece un poco al de los niños que juegan con lodo. […] El "hijo de la chingada" es el engendro de la violación, del rapto o la burla. SI se compara esta expresión con la española, "hijo de puta", se advierte inmediatamente la diferencia. Para el español la deshonra consiste en ser hijo de una mujer que voluntariamente se entrega, una prostituta; para el mexicano, es ser fruto de una violación.
Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings)
persistent, flowing through fallen shadows, excavating tunnels, drilling silences, insisting, running under my pillow, brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids with another, intangible skin made of air, its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes migrate through the provinces of my body, it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones, slips into my left ear, spills out from my right, climbs the nape of my neck, turns and turns in my skull, wanders across the terrace of my forehead, conjures visions, scatters them, erases my thoughts one by one with hands of unwetting water, it evaporates them, black surge, tide of pulse-beats, murmur of water groping forward repeating the same meaningless syllable, I hear its sleepwalking delirium losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes, it comes back, drifts off, comes back, endlessly flings itself off the edges of my cliffs, and I don’t stop falling and I fall
Octavio Paz
It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.
Don Winslow (The Cartel (Power of the Dog #2))
En el flujo y reflujo de nuestras pasiones y quehaceres (escindidos siempre, siempre yo y mi doble y el doble de mi otro yo), hay un momento en que todo pacta. Los contrarios no desaparecen, pero se funden por un instante. Es algo así como una suspensión del ánimo: el tiempo no pesa. Los Upanishad enseñan que esta reconciliación es “ananda” o deleito con lo Uno. Cierto, pocos son capaces de alcanzar tal estado. Pero todos, alguna vez, así haya sido por una fracción de segundo, hemos vislumbrado algo semejante. No es necesario ser un místico para rozar esta certidumbre. Todos hemos sido niños. Todos hemos amado. El amor es un estado de reunión y participación, abierto a los hombres : en el acto amoroso la conciencia es como la ola que, vencido el obstáculo, antes de desplomarse, se yergue en una plenitud en la que todo - forma y movimiento, impulso hacia arriba y fuerza de gravedad - alcanza un equilibrio sin apoyo, sustentado en sí mismo. Quietud del movimiento. Y del mismo modo que a través de un cuerpo amado entrevemos una vida más plena, más vida que la vida, a través del poema vislumbramos el rayo fijo de la poesía. Ese instante contiene todos los instantes. Sin dejar de fluir, el tiempo se detiene, colmado de sí. El Arco Y La Lira
Octavio Paz