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Pablo Neruda Quotes
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Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto . He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old. He wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair . He often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope.

The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called Neruda "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.

On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, Neruda read to 100,000 people in honor of the Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes.

During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina.

Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet but returned home after five days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him in the stomach with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him at the order of Pinochet. Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973 six and a half hours after that injection. Although it has always been reported that he died of prostate cancer or heart failure, on November 5, 2015 the Interior Ministry of the Chilean government issued a statement acknowledging a Ministry document from March of that year indicating the government's official position that “it was clearly possible and highly likely” that he was killed as a result of “the intervention of third parties”. Pinochet, backed by elements of the armed forces, denied permission for Neruda's funeral to be made a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.

✵ 12. July 1904 – 23. September 1973  •  Other names पाब्लो नेरुदा
Pablo Neruda photo
Pablo Neruda: 136 quotes172 likes

Pablo Neruda Quotes

“We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: Still Another Day

“Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child

hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands….”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“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

Source: Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada; Cien sonetos de amor

“I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“And I, infinitesima­l being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“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

“I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.”

Pablo Neruda

Variant: I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
Source: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

Pablo Neruda

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“At night I dream that you and I are two plants
that grew together, roots entwined,
and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,
since we are made of earth and rain.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: Regalo de un Poeta

“If suddenly you do not exist,
If suddenly you are not living,
I shall go on living.

I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.

I shall go on living.”

Pablo Neruda

“Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

¿Quién escribe tu nombre con letras de humo entre las estrellas del sur?
Ah déjame recordarte cómo eras entonces, cuando aún no existías.
"Every Day You Play" (Juegas Todos los Días), XIV, p. 35.
Source: Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924)

“Give me your hand
out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.”

Pablo Neruda

“Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicet of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying… and every day on the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like morning.”

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 book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“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 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.”

Pablo Neruda

“Love is a clash of lightnings”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“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

“And our problems will crumble apart, the soul / blow through like a wind, and here where we live
will all be clean again, with fresh bread on the table.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“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 book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”

Pablo Neruda

“Our love was born
outside the walls,
in the wind,
in the night,
in the earth,
and that's why the clay and the flower,
the mud and the roots
know your name.”

Pablo Neruda

“Donde termina el arco iris,
en tu alma o en el horizonte?

Where does the rainbow end,
in your soul or on the horizon?”

Pablo Neruda

Source: The Book of Questions

“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

“Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.”

Pablo Neruda

“And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?”

Pablo Neruda

“I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.”

Pablo Neruda

“It is not so much light that falls
over the world
extended by your body
its suffocating snow,
as brightness, pouring itself out of you,
as if you were
burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: oda a la bella desnuda y otros escritos de amor

“The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Whom can I ask what I came
to make happen in the world?”

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 book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Your eyes have the colour of the moon”

Pablo Neruda

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

“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

“So the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.”

Pablo Neruda

Source: Odes to Common Things

“White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul
You live again in time, slender and silent.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“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