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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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Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
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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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Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move today is today, always is today.
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To love is to battle, to open doors, to cease to be a ghost with a number forever in chains, forever condemned by a faceless master the world changes if two look at each other and see.
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Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
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Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
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Light is time thinking about itself.
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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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Solitude is the profoundest fact
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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
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Every moment is nothing without end.
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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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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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There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.
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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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Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
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Death is the mother of forms.
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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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