Octavio Paz Quotations

Octavio Paz was born Octavio Paz Lozano in Mexico City in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. He was a poet, writer, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate.

Sourced

Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
- Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1990

To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
- Itinerary, 1994

I go among your body as among the world,

your belly the sunlit center of the city,

your breasts two churches where are celebrated

the great parallel mysteries of the blood,

the looks of my eyes cover you like ivy,

you are a city by the sea assaulted,

you are a rampart by the light divided

into two halves, distinct, color of peaches,

and you are saltiness, you are rocks and birds

beneath the edict of concentrated noon

and dressed in the coloring of my desires

you go as naked as my thoughts go naked,

I go among your eyes as I swim water,

the tigers come to these eyes to drink their dreams,

the hummingbird is burning among these flames,

I go upon your forehead as on the moon,

like cloud I go among your imagining

journey your belly as I journey your dream,

your loins are harvest, a field of waves and singing,

your loins are crystal and your loins are water,

your lips, your hair, the looks you give me, they

all night shower down like rain, and all day long

you open up my breast with your fingers of water,

you close my eyelids with your mouth of water,

raining upon my bones, and in my breast

the roots of water drive deep a liquid tree,

I travel through your waist as through a river,

I voyage your body as through a grove going,

as by a footpath going up a mountain

and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine

I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts

break through to daylight upon your white forehead

and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered

now I collect my fragments one by one

and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark....

you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud,

you are all birds and now you are a star,

now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword

and now the executioner's bowl of blood,

the encroaching ivy that over grows and then

roots out the soul and divides it from itself,

Sun Stone (selected fragment)

If you are the amber mare

I am the road of blood

If you are the first snow

I am he who lights the hearth of dawn

If you are the tower of night

I am the spike burning in your mind

If you are the morning tide

I am the first bird's cry

If you are the basket of oranges

I am the knife of the sun

If you are the stone altar

I am the sacrilegious hand

If you are the sleeping land

I am the green cane

If you are the wind's leap

I am the buried fire

If you are the water's mouth

I am the mouth of moss

If you are the forest of the clouds

I am the axe that parts it

If you are the profaned city

I am the rain of consecration

If you are the yellow mountain

I am the red arms of lichen

If you are the rising sun

I am the road of blood

Motion Translated by Eliot Weinberger, from COLLECTED POEMS 1957-1987, copyright ©1986 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger.)

My hands

open the curtains of your being

clothe you in a further nudity

uncover the bodies of your body

My hands

invent another body for your body

Touch

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

Between Going and Staying

I am a man: little do I last

and the night is enormous.

But I look up:

the stars write.

Unknowing I understand:

I too am written,

and at this very moment

someone spells me out.

Brotherhood: Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.
- The Monkey Grammarian (1974)

We are condemned

to kill time:

so we die

little by little.

A Tale of Two Gardens

Alternating Current (1967)

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.
- André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
- André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning

"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

The Labyrinth of Solitude

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.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

To the people of New York, Paris, or London, "death" is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, however, frequents it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and most steadfast love. Of course, in his attitude perhaps there is as much fear as there is in one of the others; at least he does not hide it; he confronts it face to face with patience, disdain, or irony.

Quoternity