Pablo Neruda citations

Page 4

“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”

“I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every window.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is a clash of lightnings”

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

“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.”

“with your name on my mouth
and a kiss that never
broke away from yours.”

“Every day you play with the light of the universe.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.”

“Your eyes have the colour of the moon”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”