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When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

Octavio Paz

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Octavio Paz
Age: 84 †
Born: 1914
Born: March 31
Died: 1998
Died: April 2
Diplomat
Essayist
Lyricist
Philosopher
Poet
Politician
Translator
Writer
Mexico City
Mexico
Octavio Paz Lozano
Society
Establishing
Language
Meanings
Social
Grammar
Become
Decay
Firsts
Begins
First
Criticism
Result
Results
Decays

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Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.
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Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move today is today, always is today.
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Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
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Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
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Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.
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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
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Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition. Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.
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Loving means getting rid of names.
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Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.
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It is always difficult to give oneself up few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
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What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches.
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Every moment is nothing without end.
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Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet.... The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.
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I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?
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Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.
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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.
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Whatever is not stone is light
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