Octavio Paz quotes - page 3

People like me and I like them. (Octavio Paz)
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. View quote
Octavio Paz
Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world. View quote
Octavio Paz
Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear. View quote
Octavio Paz
Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it. View quote
Octavio Paz
No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable. View quote
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. View quote
Octavio Paz
I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Octavio Paz
The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again (invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to the end - without being concerned about what "going to the end” means or what I meant when I wrote that phrase. (Octavio Paz)
Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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”). View quote
Octavio Paz
All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Octavio Paz
It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Octavio Paz