After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.

— Octavio Paz

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

— Octavio Paz

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

— Octavio Paz

A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.

— Octavio Paz

At first, I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet. I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

— Octavio Paz

A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet…, even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us. We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act. Without this end that constantly eludes us we would not journey forth, nor would there be any paths. But the end is the refutation and the condemnation of the path: at the end the path dissolves, the meeting fades away to nothingness. And the end—it too fades away to nothingness.

— Octavio Paz

Because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time, they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source, there is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of twin a single body, a single soul, oh total being...

— Octavio Paz

Better the crime, the suicides of lovers, the incest committed by brother and sister like two mirror sin love with their likeness, better to eat the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears gob of spit for a rose in his lapel, better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn the mill that squeezes out the juice of life, that turns eternity into empty hours, minutes into prisons, and time into copper coins and abstract shit

— Octavio Paz

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

— Octavio Paz

Coda Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world. To learn to be silentlike the oak and the linden of the fable. To learn to see. Your glance scattered seeds. It planted a tree. I talk because you shake its leaves.

— Octavio Paz