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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
Social
Grammar
Become
Decay
Firsts
Begins
First
Criticism
Result
Results
Decays
Society
Establishing
Language
Meanings

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Light is time thinking about itself.
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Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.
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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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To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
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Whatever is not stone is light
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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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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
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The world is born when two people kiss
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Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. 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.
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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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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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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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The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
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Death is the mother of forms.
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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.
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