Octavio Paz quotes - page 3

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat, celebrated as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His work explores themes of identity, solitude, and the complexities of Mexican culture. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his profound impact on world poetry and thought. Here are 93 of his quotes:

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords.

Octavio Paz

Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world.

Octavio Paz

Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear.

Octavio Paz

Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it.

Octavio Paz

No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable.

Octavio Paz

I want to go on, to go beyond; I cannot; the moment scatters itself in many things, I have slept the dreams of the stone that never dreams and deep among the dreams of years like stones have heard the singing of my imprisoned blood, with a premonition of light the sea sang, and one by one the barriers give way, all of the gates have fallen to decay.

Octavio Paz

I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all.

Octavio Paz

Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when ... but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.

Octavio Paz

Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium.

Octavio Paz

Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions.

Octavio Paz

You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I.

Octavio Paz

And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation.

Octavio Paz

My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih ("I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”).

Octavio Paz

All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary.

Octavio Paz

There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.

Octavio Paz

Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind.

Octavio Paz

Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time.

Octavio Paz

Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry.

Octavio Paz

No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.

Octavio Paz

This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Octavio Paz

... que busca? Tal vez busca su destino. Tal vez su destino es buscar. ... what is he searching for? Perhaps he searches for his destiny. Perhaps his destiny is to search.

Octavio Paz

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.

Octavio Paz