Quotes & Sayings About Neruda

I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absent
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died
One word then, one smile is enough
And I'm happy; happy that it's not true — Pablo Neruda

Someone will ask later, sometimes searching for a name, his own or someone's else's why I neglected his sadness or his love ... But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone. Or maybe it was the strain of the city, of time the cold heart of the clocks ... — 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

The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body. — Eduardo Galeano

My ugly one, I love you for your waist of gold,
my beauty, I love you because of a wrinkle on your forehead,
love, I love you because you are clear and dark. — Pablo Neruda

Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing? — Matthew Zapruder

I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don't know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams. — Pablo Neruda

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. — Pablo Neruda

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood. — Pablo Neruda

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

From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands
and establishes roots that are watered by weeping. — 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

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

Every day, hands are creating the world"
-from "In Praise of Ironing — Pablo Neruda

All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. — Pablo Neruda

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle. — Pablo Neruda

According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. — Roberto Bolano

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

Neruda had his first dream,
First meeting with the Moon and the Sun
In sunny La Mancha, hiding in his heart,
Where he learned how to sing like a nightingale. — Dejan Stojanovic

Whenever you touch topaz, it touches you. It awakens a gentle fire, like wine awakens in grapes. Still unborn, clear wine seeks channels amidst stone, demands words, bestows its secret nourishment, shares out the kiss of human skin. The touch of stone and man in serene peace kindles garlands of fleeting flowers, which then return to prime sources: flesh and stone: contrary elements. (Translation, Beatriz von Eidlitz) — Pablo Neruda

The Ardent Hymn that Unites Peoples. — Pablo Neruda

I want to see the thirst
inside the syllables
I want to touch the fire
in the sound:
I want to feel the darkness
of the cry. I want
words as rough
as virgin rocks. - Verb. — Pablo Neruda

I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.
In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait — Pablo Neruda

Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few, the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth. — Pablo Neruda

In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. - PABLO NERUDA — Mark Nepo

Love is so short, and forgetting takes so long. — Pablo Neruda

We had, as men, time
So our thirst could slowly be satisfied,
the ancestral longing to enumerate things and sum them up,
to render them into dust,
dunes of numbers — 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

Without doubt I praise the wild excellence ... — Pablo Neruda

I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men. — Pablo Neruda

Your house sounds like a train at midday,
the wasps buzz, the saucepans sing,
the waterfall enumerates the deeds of the dew ... — Pablo Neruda

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases ... — Pablo Neruda

When I got the chance
I asked them a slew of questions.
They offered to burn me;
it was the only thing they knew. — Pablo Neruda

There is a kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith's best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda. — Joseph Bruchac

Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood? — Pablo Neruda

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly. — Pablo Neruda

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked. — Anita Diament

Latin America is very fond of the word "hope." We like to be called the "continent of hope." Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves "candidates of hope." This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century. — Pablo Neruda

Neither the heart cut by a sliver of glass in a wasteland of thorns, nor the atrocious waters seen in the corners of certain houses, waters like eyelids and eyes, could hold your waist in my hands when my heart lifts its oak trees toward your unbreakable thread of snow. Night sugar, spirit of crowns, redeemed human blood, your kisses banish me, and a surge of water with remnants of the sea strikes the silences that wait for you surrounding the worn-out chairs, wearing doors away. — Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda's poems tramped through the mud [with the fieldworker] ... knocked at the doors of mansions ... sat at the table of the baker ... The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers and said "Do you know him? He is my brother."
The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand. The books traveled over fences ... and bridges ... and across borders ... soaring from continent to continent ... until he had passed thousands of gifts through a hole in the fence to a multitude of people in every corner of the world. — Pam Munoz Ryan

Love is so short; forgetting is so long — Neruda, Jan

So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my sleep. — Pablo Neruda

He who has nothing - it has been said many times - has nothing to lose but his chains. — 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

I searched, but no one else had your rhythms, your light, the shady day you brought from the forest;
Nobody had your tiny ears. — 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

My eyes were consumed by your loveliness, but you have become my eyes. — Pablo Neruda

WANT TO DO WITH YOU WHAT SPRING DOES WITH THE CHERRY TREES." Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair * — Chance Carter

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

Along the Chilean coast, with cold and winter,
when rain falls washing the weeks.
Listen: solitude becomes music once more,
and it seems its appearance is that of air, of rain,
that time, something with wave and wings, passes by,
grows. And the harp awakes from oblivion. — 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

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit. — Pablo Neruda

My beauty, flower by flower, star by star,
wave by wave, love, I have counted your body. — 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

I like on the table, when we're speaking, the light of a bottle of intelligent wine. — 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

Ours is a lank country
and on the naked edge of her knife
our frail flag burns. — Pablo Neruda

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread. — Pablo Neruda

Everything is so alive, that I can be alive. Without moving I can see it all. In your life I see everything that lives. — Pablo Neruda

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey. — Pablo Neruda

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

Your eyes have the colour of the moon, — Pablo Neruda

I love you as one loves certain dark things - Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII — Cassandra Clare

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning. — Pablo Neruda

I cannot quit your love without dying. — Pablo Neruda

What did the earth teach the trees?
How to speak to the sky. — Pablo Neruda

But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel.
You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves.
Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration,
ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything. — Pablo Neruda

And here am I, budding among the ruins with only sorrow to bite on, as if weeping were a seed and I the earth's only furrow. — Pablo Neruda

Oh, may your silhouette not be broken in the sand,
oh may your eyelids not fly in the absence:
do not go for one minute, beloved,
because in that minute you will have gone so far
that I will cross all the earth asking
if you will return or if you will leave me dying. — Pablo Neruda

I stood on the balcony dark with mourning ... hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love. — Pablo Neruda

Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly — Pablo Neruda

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers. — 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

The calming sea reaches out to me. Inviting me to its pure serenity."-Elizabeth's Quotes (inspired by a Pablo Neruda quote "I need the sea because it teaches me.") — Elizabeth E. Castillo

While the rain of your fingertips falls,
while the rain of your bones falls
and your laughter and marrow falls down,
you come flying. — Pablo Neruda

Er eyes were the color of faraway love
her arms were matching topazes
her lips moved soundlessly in the coral light
and ultimately, she left by the door.. — Pablo Neruda

Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens. — Pablo Neruda

Love is a clash of lightnings — Pablo Neruda

Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter. — 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

While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone. — Pablo Neruda

Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us — Pablo Neruda

I've supped on potatoes and groats and am waiting to be sick. How about you?
I supped like the Lord in Heaven.'
and what does the Lord in Heaven have for supper?'
Nothing. — Jan Neruda

Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects. — Pablo Neruda

We must sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.
--Pablo Neruda — Wendy Brown-Baez

Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness. — Pablo Neruda

Men are jealous of every woman, even when they don't have the slightest interest in her themselves. — Jan Neruda

Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery;
that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth.
I repaid vileness with doves. — Pablo Neruda

It's today: all of yesterday was falling
between fingers of light and sleepy eyes, — Pablo Neruda

Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul? When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate, and just after learning to walk, we are tripped, and just for wanting to love, we are hated, and for no more than touching, we are hurt, which of us hasn't started to arm himself, to make himself sharp, somehow, like a knife, to pay back the hurt? — Pablo Neruda

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me. — Pablo Neruda

I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life. — Pablo Neruda

Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba,
you have vines and stars in your hair, — Pablo Neruda

And everything burned in blue, everything a star — Pablo Neruda

You will fall with me as a stone in the grave — Pablo Neruda

Give me your hand
out of the depths
sown by your sorrows. — Pablo Neruda