Octavio Paz Poetry Quotes & Sayings

In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions. — John Dewey

Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder. — Sam Kean

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them. — Octavio Paz

[Eroticism is] the poetry of the body, the testimony of the senses. Like a poem, it is not linear, it meanders and twists back on itself, shows us what we do not see with our eyes, but in the eyes of our spirit. Eroticism reveals to us another world, inside this world. The senses become servants of the imagination, and let us see the invisible and hear the inaudible. — Octavio Paz

I've spent my life following my passion. — Roger Goodell

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences. — Octavio Paz

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes. — Octavio Paz

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind. — Octavio Paz

Because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being ... — Octavio Paz

Know what you did last summer, so I started hookin' — Method Man

Life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away — Octavio Paz

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate. — Octavio Paz

What central banks can control is a base and one way they can control the base is via manipulating a particular interest rate, such as a Federal Funds rate, the overnight rate at which banks lend to one another. But they use that control to control what happens to the quantity of money. There is no disagreement. — Milton Friedman

Like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way — Octavio Paz

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

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society. — Octavio Paz

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books? — Octavio Paz

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision. — Octavio Paz

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

I could love means I could die violently, or live violently; the threat of the arrow is everywhere at once, not just in the heart. — Karen Green

The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder. — Octavio Paz

I'm something of a history buff. It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces. — Cary Elwes

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

To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations. — Octavio Paz

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Better the crime,
the suicides of lovers, the incest committed
by brother and sister like two mirrors
in love with their likeness, better to eat
the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed
of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous
vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears
a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,
better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn
the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,
that turns eternity into empty hours,
minutes into prisons, and time into
copper coins and abstract shit — 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

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

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future. — Octavio Paz

Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods. — Rudy Rucker

I heard my blood, singing in its prison,
and the sea sang with a murmur of light,
one by one the walls gave way,
all of the doors were broken down,
and the sun came bursting through my forehead,
it tore apart my closed lids,
cut loose my being from its wrappers,
and pulled me out of myself to wake me
from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone — Octavio Paz

To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, — Octavio Paz

Always double-knot your sneakers. One of my teammates once lost a shoe during a game! — Heather Mitts

Oh life to live, life already lived,
time that comes back in a swell of sea,
time that recedes without turning its head,
the past is not past, it is still passing by,
flowing silently into the next vanishing moment — Octavio Paz