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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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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
Term
Society
Poetic
Two
Apart
Cannot
Realized
Without
Seek
Sometimes
Terms
Never
Poetry
Break

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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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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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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.
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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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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
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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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There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
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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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What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend 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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Deserve your dream.
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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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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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The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
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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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The world is born when two people kiss
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What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
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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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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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