Pablo Neruda Quotes & Sayings

Love is the mystery of water and a star. — Pablo Neruda

The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light. — Pablo Neruda

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus able to discover Spain? — Pablo Neruda

Woman, I would have been your child, to drink the milk of your breasts as from a well, to see and feel you at my side and have you in your gold laughter and your crystal voice.
To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by
to emerge in the stanza-cleansed of all evil.
How I would love you woman, how I would love you, love you as no one ever did!
Die and still
love you more.
And still
love you more
and more. — Pablo Neruda

Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that forms
the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds
filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes
and your mouth that has the smile of the water.
A black yearning sun is braided into the strands
of your black mane, when you stretch your arms.
You play with the sun as with a little brook
and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes. — Pablo Neruda

I got lost in the night, without the light
of your eyelids, and when the night surrounded me
I was born again: I was the owner of my own darkness. — Pablo Neruda

The road made wet by the water of August
shines like it was cut in full moonlight — Pablo Neruda

She did not speak for speech was unknown to her. — Pablo Neruda

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it? — Pablo Neruda

Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness. — Pablo Neruda

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark. — Pablo Neruda

From scarlet to powdered gold, to blazing yellow, to the rare ashen emerald, to the orange and black velvet of your shimmering corselet, out to the tip that like an amber thorn begins you, small, superlative being, you are a miracle, and you blaze — Pablo Neruda

The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones. — Pablo Neruda

Love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes. — Pablo Neruda

Sonnet XXV
Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.
I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.
Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all
Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts. — Pablo Neruda

Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth ... — Pablo Neruda

Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly and then you see it coming with blood along its blade, but transparency disarms it. — Pablo Neruda

Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life. — Pablo Neruda

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence ... — Pablo Neruda

I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us. — Pablo Neruda

I love you without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you this way because I know no other way to love, — Pablo Neruda

I want to do for you what the spring does for the cherry trees — Pablo Neruda

Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives you will have it steaming and burning at your tables: so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times: you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes, this bowl of silent blood that will be there each morning, each morning. A — Pablo Neruda

Book
beautiful
book,
miniscule forest,
leaf
after leaf
your paper smells
of the elements ... — Pablo Neruda

Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in the world? — Pablo Neruda

And what has become of it, where is that onetime love? Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain. — Pablo Neruda

Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude. — Pablo Neruda

And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world. — Pablo Neruda

The night is starry, and she is not with me. That is all. — Pablo Neruda

Cannot a kiss of spring also kill you?
Do you believe that ahead of you grief carries the flag of your destiny? — Pablo Neruda

Here is the solitude from which you are absent.
It is raining. The sea wind is hunting stray gulls.
The water walks barefoot in the wet streets. From that tree the leaves complain as though they were sick.
White bee, even when you are gone, you live in my soul. You live again in time, slender and silent.
Ah, you who are silent. — Pablo Neruda

This time is difficult, wait for me: we will live it out vividly. Give me your small hand: we will rise and suffer, we will feel and rejoice. We are once more the pair who lived in bristling places, in harsh nests in the rock. This time is difficult, wait for me with a basket, with a shovel, with your shoes and your clothes. Now we need each other not only for the carnations' sake, not only to look for honey: we need our hands to wash with and to make fire, and so let our difficult time stand up to infinity with four hands and four eyes. — Pablo Neruda

Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you? — Pablo Neruda

Of everything I have seen, it's you I want to go on seeing: of everything I've touched, it's your flesh I want to go on touching. I love your orange laughter. I am moved by the sight of you sleeping. What am I to do, love, loved one? I don't know how others love or how people loved in the past. I live, watching you, loving you. Being in love is my nature. — Pablo Neruda

Clenched Soul
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand.
While the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in the sadness of mine that you know.
Where we you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards the twilight erasing statues. — Pablo Neruda

Como se acuerda con los pajaros
la traduccion de sus idiomas?
How is the translation of their languages
Arranged with the birds? — Pablo Neruda

Look around - there's only one thing of danger for you here - poetry. — Pablo Neruda

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles? — Pablo Neruda

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day. — Pablo Neruda

I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast. — Pablo Neruda

This means that we have barely disembarked into life, that we've only just now been born, let's not fill our mouths with so many uncertain names, with so many sad labels, with so many pompous letters, with so much yours and mine, with so much signing of papers. I intend to confuse things, to unite them, make them new-born intermingle them, undress them, until the light of the world has the unity of the ocean, a generous wholeness, a fragrance alive and crackling. — Pablo Neruda

Before loving you, love, nothing was mine:
I hesitated through the streets and things:
nothing mattered or had a name:
the world was of the air that I awaited. — Pablo Neruda

O merry, merry, merry, like only dogs know how to be happy and nothing more, with an absolute shameless nature. — Pablo Neruda

My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living. — Pablo Neruda

In you is the illusion of each day. You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers. You undermine the horizon with your absence. Eternally in flight like the wave. — Pablo Neruda

We came by night to the Fortunate Isles, And lay like fish Under the net of our kisses. — Pablo Neruda

I remembered you with my soul clenched — Pablo Neruda

I crown you, small monarch of my bones, — Pablo Neruda

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries. — Pablo Neruda

My duty moves along with my song:
I am I am not: that is my destiny.
I exist not if I do not attend to the pain
of those who suffer: they are my pains.
For I cannot be without existing for all,
for all who are silent and oppressed,
I come from the people and I sing for them:
my poetry is song and punnishment. — Pablo Neruda

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart. — Pablo Neruda

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.
I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache. — Pablo Neruda

Dark is the world's night without you my love, — Pablo Neruda

Don't go far off, not even for a day,
because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in
an empty station when the trains are
parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then
the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
on the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
a second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
have gone so far I'll wander mazily
over all the earth, asking, will you
come back? Will you leave me here, dying? — Pablo Neruda

My kisses fell, happy as embers. — Pablo Neruda

And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy. — Pablo Neruda

A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory. — Pablo Neruda

Love has to be ... flowering like the stars, and measureless as a kiss. — Pablo Neruda

I live with pain that is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
do me irreparable harm. Your caresses enfold me, like climbing vines on melancholy walls. — Pablo Neruda

It's hard to tell
if we close our eyes or if night
opens in us other starred eyes,
if it burrows into the wall of our dream
till some other door opens.
But the dream
is only the flitting costume of one moment,
is spent in one beat
of the darkness,
and falls at our feet, cast off
as the day stirs and sails away with us."
-from "In the Tower — Pablo Neruda

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming. — Pablo Neruda

I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees. — Pablo Neruda

I remember only a day
that was perhaps never intended for me,
it was an incessant day,
without origins, Thursday.
I was a man transported by chance
with a woman vaguely found,
we undressed
as if to die or swim or grow old
and we thrust ourselves one inside the other,
she surrounding me like a hole,
I cracking her like a bell,
for she was the sound that wounded me
and the hard dome determined to tremble. — Pablo Neruda

We bear the sole, relentless tenderness. — Pablo Neruda

You, my friend, could be the smoke's daughter,
you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage,
lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth,
your sex in the scorched oak's moss like a ring in a nest,
your fingers there in the flames, your compact body
rose from leaves of fire that make me recall
there were bakers in your family tree,
you're still the rainforest's bread, ash from violent wheat, — Pablo Neruda

We have to discard the past / and, as one builds / floor by floor, window by window, / and the building rises, / so do we keep shedding - first, broken tiles, / then proud doors ... and each new day / gleams / like an empty / plate. — Pablo Neruda

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. — Pablo Neruda

I love you like the plant that does not bloom
and carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers, — Pablo Neruda

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty
distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest. — Pablo Neruda

Come With Me, I Said, And No One Knew (VII)
Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.
I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!
That is why when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine
the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald — Pablo Neruda

Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky's questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow. — Pablo Neruda

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness
And the infinite tenderness shattered you like a jar. — Pablo Neruda

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky. — Pablo Neruda

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air. — Pablo Neruda

In you the wars and the flights accumulated,
From you the wings of the songbirds rose. — Pablo Neruda

Love is a clash of lightnings — Pablo Neruda

Remembering her, it is as if my heart were buried in the rain.
Again I think it's she, but why would she be coming now? Oh, what
sad days!
[ ... ] Your eyes : two sleepy cups darkened by purple berries from
the forest undergrowth. What a leaf, a leaf from a white vine,
fragrant and heavy, I could have brought you from the forest. Every-
thing flees from this solitude enforced by rain and contemplation. — Pablo Neruda

It was beautiful to live
when you lived! — Pablo Neruda

Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadows
where you accompany me in your dreams
and tell me the hour of light. — Pablo Neruda

I love your feet
because they have
wandered over
the earth and through
the wind and water
until they brought
you to me. — Pablo Neruda

What can I say without touching the earth with my hands? — Pablo Neruda

You are like nobody since I love you. — Pablo Neruda

Por que en las epocas oscuras
se escribe con tinta invisible?
Why in the darkest ages
do they write with invisible ink? — Pablo Neruda

Under your skin the moon is alive. — Pablo Neruda

For human beings, not to speak is to die"
-from "The Word — Pablo Neruda

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans. — Pablo Neruda

I am not me but the living matter fermenting and forming it's own shape in the fruitfulness of everyday — Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms,
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.
Thanks to your love a certain fragrance,
risen darkly from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride,
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where "I" does not exist, nor "you,"
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
So close that your eyes close and I fall asleep. — Pablo Neruda

I don't know a thing about cats.
I know everything else, life and its archipelago,
seas and unpredictable cities,
botany,
the pistil and its scandals,
the pluses and minuses of math.
I know the earth's volcanic funnels
and the crocodile's unreal shell,
the fireman's unseen kindness
and the priest's blue atavism.
cat leave
But a cat I can't figure out.
My mind slipped on its indifference.
Its eyes hold ciphers of gold. — Pablo Neruda

Then love knew it was called love.
And when I lifted my eyes to your name,
suddenly your heart showed me my way — Pablo Neruda

About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you — Pablo Neruda

Poetry is an act of peace. — Pablo Neruda

You, in bloom, heart, beloved,
you are like the foliage of the sky over my eyes
and I look at you lying on the earth — Pablo Neruda

They lie those that say I lost the moon,
those that prophesized my fate of sand,
they assert so many things with cold tongues:
they wish to ban the flower of the universe. — Pablo Neruda

O happy childhood! blessed youth! But once we know thy potent power; But once we live all careless free; No cross to mar our love-lit bower. — Pablo Neruda

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you. — Pablo Neruda

Every day you play with the light of the universe. — Pablo Neruda

I am made of earth, and my song made of words. — Pablo Neruda

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon. — Pablo Neruda

You make me thank god for every mistake I ever made, Because each one led me down the path that brought me to you. — Pablo Neruda