Quote collection
108 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality."
"There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society."
"The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature."
"My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped."
"If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time."
"Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul."
"If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide."
"Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life"
"Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings."
"Death is the mother of forms."
"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history."
"Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society."
"Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today."
"The woman who died night after night and her dying was a long goodbye, a train that never left."
"Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift."
"Solitude is the profoundest fact"
"I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality."
"It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death."
"When we learn to speak, we learn to translate."
"To fight evil is to fight ourselves."