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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.

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
Dark
Suddenly
Chained
Sound
Enormous
Riot
Stills
Million
Beaten
Still
Window
Solid
Green
Branches
Swaying
Wind
Trees
Murmur
Tree
Leaves
Surge
Millions
Sounds
Grove

More quotes by Octavio Paz

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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.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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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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Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
Octavio Paz
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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Octavio Paz
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The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz
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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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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.
Octavio Paz
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Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
Octavio Paz
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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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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.
Octavio Paz
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Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
Octavio Paz
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Octavio Paz
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Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
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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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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.
Octavio Paz
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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.
Octavio Paz