Top 290 Quotes & Sayings by Pablo Neruda - Page 4

I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast.

But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

The Truth is in the prolouge. Death to the romantic fool., the expert in solitary confinement.

In love, you have loosened yourself like seawater

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

Each in the most hidden sack kept the lost jewels of memory, intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses, the fragment of public or private happiness. A few, the wolves, collected thighs, other men loved the dawn scratching mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers. For me happiness was to share singing, praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes. I ask forgiveness for my bad ways: my life had no use on earth.

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when.

It's hard to tell / if we close our eyes or if night / opens in us other starred eyes, / if it burrows into the wall of our dream / till some other door opens. / But the dream is only the flitting costume of one moment, / is spent in one beat / of the darkness, / and falls at our feet, cast off / as the day stirs and sails away with us.

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?

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

To love is to tilt with the lightning, two bodies routed by a single honey's sweet.

A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory.

I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

I am made of earth, and my song made of words.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is not so much light that falls over the world extended by your body its suffocating snow, as brightness, pouring itself out of you, as if you were burning inside. Under your skin the moon is alive.

Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.

We open the halves of a miracle, and a clotting of acids brims into the starry divisions: creation's original juices, irreducible, changeless, alive: so the freshness lives on

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

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.

And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

Raw hatred took its time making an outpost of its rage and prepared for me a savage crown with rusty, bloodstained spikes. It wasn't pride that made me keep my heart at a distance from such terror, nor did I waste on revenge or the pursuit of power the forces that came from my selfish griefs or my accumulated joys. It was something else-my helplessness.

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

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness, and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

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.

Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

I do not love you except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, From waiting to not waiting for you My heart moves from cold to fire. I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly. Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel Ray, stealing my key to true calm. In this part of the story I am the one who Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you, Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicet of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?

And here am I, budding among the ruins with only sorrow to bite on, as if weeping were a seed and I the earth's only furrow.

Fue adondo a mi me perdieron quw logre por fin encontrarme? Was it where they lost me that I finally found myself?

Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly and then you see it coming with blood along its blade, but transparency disarms it.

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.

I learned about life from life itself, love I learned in a single kiss and could teach no one anything except that I have lived with something in common among men.

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.

Hands make the world each day.

I want to see thirst In the syllables, Tough fire In the sound; Feel through the dark For the scream.

Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist summit, drops of when and how, vague comings and goings: between lips and lips as along a shore of sand and glass the wind passes.

About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you

The best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread: the local baker.

Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!

Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world? Why do I move without wanting to, why am I not able to sit still? Why do I go rolling without wheels, flying without wings or feathers, and why did I decide to migrate if my bones live in Chile?

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.

What does autumn go on paying for with so much yellow money?

And our problems will crumble apart, the soul / blow through like a wind, and here where we live will all be clean again, with fresh bread on the table.

What can I say without touching the earth with my hands?

And what has become of it, where is that onetime love? Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain.

Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit.

For now I ask no more Than the justice of eating.

Who do I belong to? How come I mortgaged my being till I don't belong to myself? How come I sold my blood? And who now owns my indecisions, my hands, my private pain, my pride?

When I got the chance I asked them a slew of questions. They offered to burn me; it was the only thing they knew.

I believed that the way passed through Man, and that it was from there that destiny had to emerge.

It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.

I stood on the balcony dark with mourning... hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love.

We came by night to the Fortunate Isles, And lay like fish Under the net of our kisses.

Love! Love until the night collapses!

Cómo se acuerda con los pájaros la traducción de sus idiomas?

How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood - and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.