Life is other, always there, further off, beyond you and beyond me, always on the horizon, life which unlives us and makes us strangers, that invents our face and wears it away

— Octavio Paz

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.

— Octavio Paz

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

— Octavio Paz

Mineral cacti, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learned to send myself off. Later there were no gardens.

— Octavio Paz

No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there.

— Octavio Paz

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.

— Octavio Paz

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

— Octavio Paz

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

— Octavio Paz

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down we don't move today is always is today.

— Octavio Paz

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.

— Octavio Paz