Pablo Neruda Quotes
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Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?
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As slippery as smooth grapes, words exploding in the light like dormant seeds waiting in the vaults of vocabulary, alive again, and giving life: once again the heart distills them.
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From scarlet to powdered gold, to blazing yellow, to the rare ashen emerald, to the orange and black velvet of your shimmering corselet, out to the tip that like an amber thorn begins you, small, superlative being, you are a miracle, and you blaze
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Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it, comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no finger in it, comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue,with no throat. Nevertheless its steps can be heard and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
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Over your breasts of motionless current, over your legs of firmness and water, over the permanence and the pride of your naked hair I want to be, my love, now that the tears are thrown into the raucous baskets where they accumulate, I want to be, my love, alone with a syllable of mangled silver, alone with a tip of your breast of snow.
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On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
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Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress? Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots? Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile? Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain?
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I got lost in the night, without the light of your eyelids, and when the night surrounded me I was born again: I was the owner of my own darkness.
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Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star, in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran; love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes, two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey.
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At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined, and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain.
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How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.
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Someone will ask later, sometimes searching for a name, his own or someone's else's why I neglected his sadness or his love... But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone. Or maybe it was the strain of the city, of time the cold heart of the clocks.
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I should like to sleep like a cat, with all the fur of time, with a tongue rough as flint, with the dry sex of fire; and after speaking to no one, stretch myself over the world, over roofs and landscapes, with a passionate desire to hunt the rats in my dreams.
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The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence...
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We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.
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Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
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Tonight I can write the saddest lines...Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.
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Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood?
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If you no longer live, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain in my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall live
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The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
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Mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada
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Give me, for my life, all lives, give me all the pain of everyone, I'm going to turn it into hope. Give me all the joys, even the most secret, because otherwise how will these things be known? I have to tell them, give me the labors of everyday, for that's what I sing.
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Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you?
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I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.