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

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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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A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.
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For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
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Death is the mother of forms.
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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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Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
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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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Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
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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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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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The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
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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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Whatever is not stone is light
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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 fight evil is to fight ourselves.
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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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A flower without a stem, is beauty waiting to die. A heart without love, is a tear waiting to cry.
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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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Loving means getting rid of names.
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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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