Portuguese Poetry Quotes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

If Thou Must Love Me If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love's sake only. Do not say, 'I love her for her smile—her look—her way Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry: A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

As palavras que te envio são interditas até, meu amor, pelo halo das searas; se alguma regressasse, nem já reconhecia o teu nome nas suas curvas claras.

Escrevo sem pensar tudo o que meu inconsciente grita. Penso depois: não só para corrigir, mas para justificar o que escrevi.

Um pouco mais de sol - eu era brasa, Um pouco mais de azul - eu era além. Para atingir, faltou-me um golpe de asa... Se ao menos eu permanecesse aquém...

i smile. things taken for granted have a way of catching you offguard when you least expect it, and then you're taken by what the portuguese calls saudade, a sense of longing for something, someone not there anymore.

He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited: "O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow." She did not understand. "It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother," he explained. "He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five songs, and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did." "Was he a priest too?" "A soldier," he said. Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle.When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María's hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering. "I am always in this state," he said. And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask: "And now?" "And now nothing," he said. "It is enough for me that you know." He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o'clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads. Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. 'When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me," she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: "What's the rest of it?" "I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end," he said. She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them.

who has time to dream about butterflies in a world of caged birds?

Neptune’s Lost Banana by Stewart Stafford O lost banana of Neptune, Do you wonder why you’ve washed ashore? Do people see a yellow fruit in the water? Or a Portuguese Man O’War? You were so near the fingertips of power, Did fortune peel away your chances too quick? Or do you see yourself in an ivory tower? Of a split-away banana republic? You could have been top banana, Now you’re potential poetic justice, For someone with bad karma to slip on, And go skidding as you go squish. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

Sonnet of Languages Turkish is the language of love, Spanish is the language of revolution. Swedish is the language of resilience, English is the language of translation. Portuguese is the language of adventure, German is the language of discipline. French is the language of passion, Italian is the language of cuisine. With over 7000 languages in the world, Handful of tongues fall short in a sonnet. But you can rest assured of one thing, Every language does something the very best. Each language is profoundly unique in its own way. When they come together, they light the human way.

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?

I might have flaws, live anxiously and sometimes be irritated but, I do not forget that my life if the World’s biggest company, and I can avoid it to bankrupt. To be happy is to recognize that it is worth living, besides all challenges, incomprehension’s or crisis. To be happy is not to let ourselves beat by the problems, becoming an author of our own history. To be happy is to cross deserts outrageously, but to still be able to find your own oasis in the deepest of your soul. It is thanking God each morning for the miracle of life. To be happy is not to be afraid of your own feelings. To be happy is to speak about your personality. To be happy is to have the guts to hear a “NO”. Is to have the security hearing a critique, even that it is unfair. And if I have rocks on my way, I shall keep them all. Someday, I will build up my own castle…

sobs” (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks hüzün (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy—and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile? Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire’s “spleen,” Edgar Allan Poe’s moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced. … If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so—for a profit, of course. There is another danger: in addition to harming children, we are harming society and our future. Measures that aim at reducing variability and swings in the lives of children are also reducing variability and differences within our said to be Great Culturally Globalized Society.

Para viajar basta existir

A blue-white sky, a simple web, backing for feathery detail: brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel, a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate; and perching there in profile, beaks agape, the big symbolic birds keep quiet, each showing only half his puffed and padded, pure-colored or spotted breast. Still in the foreground there is Sin: five sooty dragons near some massy rocks. The rocks are worked with lichens, grey moonbursts splattered and overlapping, threatened from underneath by moss in lovely hell-green flames, attacked from above by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat, “one leaf yes and one leaf no” (in Portuguese).

Non so che fare, resto a guardarti e ad amarti da solo. Restare a guardarti e ad amarti, anche se da solo, è sempre una buona decisione.

Attraversiamo la vita, amore, esitando tra respirare e non respirare. E scegliamo sempre la terza possibilità. Perché ci sono due strade per essere vivi. Ma è sulla terza che si trova la vita.

Era imperdonabile che l'amasse così tanto. Un giorno le chiese di smettere d'essere così perfetta, e lei con tutta la sua perfezione rispose di sì, fece una brutta faccia e lui disse "bella". Poi si spogliò, il corpo intero, tutti i difetti. Gli fece notare le smagliature dietro le gambe, una cicatrice al centro della pancia, lo implorò di guardare attentamente. Lui quando capì stava già piangendo, gli occhi e la perversa constatazione che può essere ammirevole perfino quello che l'estetica ritiene riprovevole. L'amore è cieco ma ci apre sempre gli occhi.

Ho attraversato il mondo intero ma non ho mai visto una regione più bella del litorale delle tue spalle.

La morte è dietro il tuo bacio, e non mi interessa nulla di ciò che non può uccidermi.

E così fu. Tutti i giorni, nel tardo pomeriggio, un furgone della casa editrice si fermava davanti alla loro porta e lasciava lì quattro libri, a volte di più, e così trascorrevano le serate, lei a leggere e lui a vederla leggere, tutto il mondo e tutto lo sforzo acquistavano senso per sempre.

L'amore può anche essere soltanto qualcuno che ci chiede di lasciarci proteggere, e ci protegge davvero.

Mi hai chiesto di scriverti qualcosa di felice e io mi sono ricordato di noi, conosci una felicità più grande di questa?

Passo ore a sentirmi indistruttibile, a esser certo che nulla mi tocchi, che nulla potrà ferirmi abbastanza da farmi indietreggiare, e poi arrivi tu.

To be great, be whole; exclude Nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. The whole moon gleams in every pool, Because it rides so high.