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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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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
Poetry
Struggle
Words
Art
Characterizes
Much
Transcend
Dependence
Poem
Necessary
More quotes by Octavio Paz
Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
The world is born when two people kiss
Octavio Paz
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
Octavio Paz
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
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
Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.
Octavio Paz
The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.
Octavio Paz
Light is time thinking about itself.
Octavio Paz
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Octavio Paz
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.
Octavio Paz
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
Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.
Octavio Paz
The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left.
Octavio Paz
Death is the mother of forms.
Octavio Paz
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
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
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
For every language that becomes extinct, an image of man disappears.
Octavio Paz
Solitude is the profoundest fact
Octavio Paz
