Pablo Neruda citations

Page 3

“Un seul mot, usé, mais qui brille comme une vieille pièce de monnaie: merci!”

“Je continue à travailler avec les matériaux dont je dispose et qui me constituent. Je suis un omnivore avide de sentiments, d'êtres vivants, de livres, d'évènements et de batailles. Je mangerais toute la terre. Je boirais la mer entière.

J'avoue que j'ai vécu”

“Dans ma patrie,
on emprisonne les mineurs
et le soldat commande au juge.
Mais j'aime, moi, jusqu'aux racines
de mon petit pays si froid.
Si je devais mourir cent fois,
c'est là que je voudrais mourir
et si je devais naître cent fois
c'est là aussi que je veux naître.”

“La timidité est une condition étrange du coeur, une catégorie, une dimension qui débouche sur la solitude. C'est aussi une souffrance dont on ne peut se défaire, comme si l'on avait deux épidermes et que la deuxième peau intérieure s'irritait et se contractait devant la vie.

J'avoue que j'ai vécu”

“Le raffinement culinaire était l'orgueil suprême des trois soeurs; la table représentait pour elles la conservation d'un héritage sacré, d'une culture aux terres de laquelle elles ne reviendraient plus, écartées de leur patrie par le temps et par des mers immenses.

J'avoue que j'ai vécu”

“La poésie est toujours un acte de paix. Le poète naît de la paix comme le pain naît de la farine.

J'avoue que j'ai vécu”

“When everything seems to be set to show me off as intelligent, the fool I always keep hidden takes over all that I say.”

“And something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and I suddenly saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open.”

“I am alone with rickety materials,
the rain falls on me, and it is like me,
it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world,
repulsed as it falls, and with no persistent form.”

“In love, you have loosened yourself like seawater”

“Do thoughts of love fall
into extinct volcanoes?”

“Is there a star more wide open
than the word 'poppy""""?”

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

“To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.”

“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 in blood.”

“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.”

“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….”

“my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Give me silence, water, hope
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“I want to see thirst
In the syllables,
Tough fire
In the sound;
Feel through the dark
For the scream.”

“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.”

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

“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.”