Quotes by Pablo Neruda

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.

Poetry is an act of peace.

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

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly and then you see it coming with blood along its blade, but transparency disarms it.

Let's try and avoid death in small doses,
reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.
Only a burning patience will lead
to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

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

Beyond the earth and the shadow
the brightness of our love will stay alive.

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus able to discover Spain?

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness.

I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,
embracing the lost bouquet of your body,
and searching for the light of your closed eyes.

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.

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land.

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

When did the lemons learn the same creed as the sun?

And so this letter ends
with no sadness:
my feet are firm upon the earth,
my hand writes this letter on the road,
and in the midst of life I shall be
always
beside the friend, facing the enemy,
with your name on my mouth
and a kiss that never
broke away from yours.

Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss.

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

In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begins.

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.

With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?

I had no more alphabet
than the journeying of the swallows,
the pure and tiny water
of the small, fiery bird
that dances rising from the pollen.

With kisses your mouth taught me
my lips came to know fire.

And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world.

And that's why i have to go back to so many places there to find myself and constantly examine myself with no witness but the moon and then whistle with joy, ambling over rocks and clods of earth, with no task but to live, with no family but the road.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive.

Shyness is a condition foreign to the heart -- a category, a dimension which leads to loneliness.

From that terrible love the soft pure hands
gave peace to my eyes and sun to my senses.

I touched you and my life stopped.

To love is to tilt with the lightning, two bodies routed by a single honey's sweet.

Sometimes i get up at dawn, and even my soul is wet.

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

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

I spin on the circle of wave upon wave of the sea.

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.

Only a burning patience will lead to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shore of silence or where the storm has passed rampaging like a train. There the faint signs are left, coins of time and water, debris ,celestial ash and the irreplaceable rapture of sharing in the labour of soitude in the sand.

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

We open the halves of a miracle, and a clotting of acids brims into the starry divisions: creation's original juices, irreducible, changeless, alive: so the freshness lives on.

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

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.

So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.

While inside, a ferocious love wound around
and around me-till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword,
slashing a seared road through my heart
100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott.

The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading.

I've come within range of hate. Terrifying, its tremors, its dizzying obsessions. Hate's like a swordfish invisible in the water, knifing suddenly into sight with blood on its blade- clear water misleads you.

I am everybody and every time, I always call myself by your name.

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

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.

No one will retrieve my lost heart
amidst so many roots, in the bitter freshness
of the sun multiplied by the fury of the water,
there the shadow lives that does not travel with me.

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.

To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know ... widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

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

You will fall with me as a stone in the grave.

Of so much moon were your hips to me,
of all the sun your deep mouth and its delight,
of so much burning light like honey in the shade.

Your eyes have the colour of the moon.

I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair.

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

The best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread: the local baker.

I should like to sleep like a cat, with all the fur of time, with a tongue rough as flint, with the dry sex of fire; and after speaking to no one, stretch myself over the world, over roofs and landscapes, with a passionate desire to hunt the rats in my dreams.

Conspirators in pajamas who exchange deep kisses for passwords.

And what has become of it, where is that onetime love? Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain.

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?

If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

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.

Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you?

Once more I am the silent one who came out of the distance wrapped in cold rain and bells: I owe to earth's pure death the will to sprout.

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.

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.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body... and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.

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 the cold into the fire.

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.

Today is today, and yesterday is gone. There is no doubt.

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

I think it was very informative, but a lot still needs to be done.

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.

I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.

There's a country spread out in the sky, a credulous carpet of rainbows and crepuscular plants: I move toward it just a bit haggardly, trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade to dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

The tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.

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.

Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

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

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

As slippery as smooth grapes, words exploding in the light like dormant seeds waiting in the vaults of vocabulary, alive again, and giving life: once again the heart distills them.

I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.

Under your skin the moon is alive.

I crown you, small monarch of my bones.

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

It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.

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

What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?

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.

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.

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

Each hour, Each day.

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

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.

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

Of all the fires, love is the only inexhaustible one.

Love is a clash of lightnings.

But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.

Every day you play with the light of the universe.

It was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know from extinguished constellations.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

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

Love is not about property, diamonds and gifts. It is about sharing your very self with the world around you.

I need the sea because it teaches me.

Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.

Laughter is the language of the soul.

They will say: The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep, more other .

Dark is the world's night without you my love,.

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.

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

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence.

We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on.

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.

Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world? Why do I move without wanting to, why am I not able to sit still? Why do I go rolling without wheels, flying without wings or feathers, and why did I decide to migrate if my bones live in Chile?

And everything burned in blue, everything a star.

I love you without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you this way because I know no other way to love,.

So I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

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

Love is short, but forgetting is long.

In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadows
where you accompany me in your dreams
and tell me the hour of light.

I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.

As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that 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 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.

But from each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies.