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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.

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
Terrorism
Mazes
Mirrors
Endlessly
Likes
Repeated
Wide
Chamber
Modern
Nightmare
Reason
Pretend
Men
Torture
Thinking
Awake
Chambers

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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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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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Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
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Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
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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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Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.
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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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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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A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
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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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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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Man does not speak because he thinks he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.
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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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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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Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
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Light is time thinking about itself.
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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
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Solitude is the profoundest fact
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Whatever is not stone is light
Octavio Paz