Top 290 Quotes & Sayings by Pablo Neruda - Page 5

And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to you to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?

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...

O merry, merry, merry, like only dogs know how to be happy and nothing more, with an absolute shameless nature.

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?

I want to do with you what the spring does with the cherry trees.

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.

I had no more alphabet than the journeying of the swallows, the pure and tiny water of the small, fiery bird that dances rising from the pollen.

When did the lemons learn the same creed as the sun?

The darkness of a day elapsed, of a day nourished with our sad blood.

When your hands leap towards mine, love, what do they bring me in flight?

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling.

The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.

Where were you then? Who else was there? Saying what? Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?

Then Scale by scale, We strip off The delicacy And eat The peaceful mush Of its green heart.

Hay algo más tonto en la vida Que llamarse Pablo Neruda? (is there anything more insane in this life than being called Pablo Neruda?)

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.

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul You live again in time, slender and silent.

I've come within range of hate. Terrifying, its tremors, its dizzying obsessions. Hate's like a swordfish invisible in the water, knifing suddenly into sight with blood on its blade- clear water misleads you.

The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light.

She did not speak for speech was unknown to her.

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus able to discover Spain?

The road made wet by the water of August shines like it was cut in full moonlight

Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth.

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

For me writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.

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.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.

O happy childhood! blessed youth! But once we know thy potent power; But once we live all careless free; No cross to mar our love-lit bower.

Latin America is very fond of the word "hope." We like to be called the "continent of hope." Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves "candidates of hope." This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century.

While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone.

The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading.

De pronto no puedo decirte lo que yo te debo decir, hombre,perdóname; sabrás que aunque no escuches mis palabras no me eché a llorar ni a dormir y que contigo estoy sin verte desde hace tiempo y hasta el fin. I can't just suddenly tell you what I should be telling you, friend, forgive me; you know that although you don't hear my words, I wasn't asleep or in tears, that I am with you without seeing you for a good long time and until the end.

Sometimes a piece of sun burned like a coin in my hand.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

Como se reparten el sol en el naranjo las naranjas? How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree?

Love is short, but forgetting is long.

Your house sounds like a train at midday, the wasps buzz, the saucepans sing, the waterfall enumerates the deeds of the dew . . .

Donde termina el arco iris, en tu alma o en el horizonte? Where does the rainbow end, in your soul or on the horizon?

There's a country spread out in the sky, a credulous carpet of rainbows and crepuscular plants: I move toward it just a bit haggardly, trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade to dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it has no name.

I want to see the thirst inside the syllables I want to touch the fire in the sound: I want to feel the darkness of the cry. I want words as rough as virgin rocks.” - Verb.

The Ardent Hymn that Unites Peoples.

Megaphone in which the wind passes singing.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

I spin on the circle of wave upon wave of the sea.

Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects.

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it?

La heradera del dia destruida. (The heiress of the destroyed day.)