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If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time.
Octavio Paz -
It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?
Octavio Paz
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Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.
Octavio Paz -
Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.
Octavio Paz -
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Octavio Paz -
The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented.
Octavio Paz -
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.
Octavio Paz -
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
Octavio Paz
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Octavio Paz -
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 nor our confidant.
Octavio Paz -
The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.
Octavio Paz -
Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity.
Octavio Paz -
In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.
Octavio Paz -
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
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Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Octavio Paz -
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
Octavio Paz -
In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.
Octavio Paz -
To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises.
Octavio Paz -
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.
Octavio Paz -
Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.
Octavio Paz
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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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.
Octavio Paz -
Deserve your dream.
Octavio Paz -
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.
Octavio Paz