Pablo Neruda Quotes - Page 7

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

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.

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

Eating alone is a disappointment. But not eating matter more, is hollow and green, has thorns like a chain of fish hooks, trailing from the heart, clawing at your insides. Hunger feels like pincers, like the bite of crabs; it burns, burns, and has no fur. Let us sit down soon to eat with all those who haven't eaten; let us spread great tablecloths, put salt in lakes of the world, set up planetary bakeries, tables with strawberries in snow, and a plate like the moon itself from which we can all eat. For now I ask no more than the justice of eating.

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when.

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.

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.

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.

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

Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes and your mouth that has the smile of the water. A black yearning sun is braided into the strands of your black mane, when you stretch your arms. You play with the sun as with a little brook and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

Each in the most hidden sack kept the lost jewels of memory, intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses, the fragment of public or private happiness. A few, the wolves, collected thighs, other men loved the dawn scratching mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers. For me happiness was to share singing, praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes. I ask forgiveness for my bad ways: my life had no use on earth.

I move in the university of the waves.

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.

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.

Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress? Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots? Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile? Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain?

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.

Place gifts of silver in our hands. Give us this day our daily fish.

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.

In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.

I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast.

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

I am made of earth, and my song made of words.