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" It has always surprised me that in a world of relations as hard as that of the United States, cordiality constantly springs out like water from an unstanchable fountain. "

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" Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning. "

Octavio Paz

Language

Meaning

Words

" To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language. "

" The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. "

Octavio Paz

Big

Little

" What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. "

" Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual. "

" Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision. "

" One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it. "

" In order for sensation to accede to the objectivity of things, it must itself be changed into a thing. The agent of change is language: the sensations are turned into verbal objects. "

" As it defines itself, every society defines other societies. That definition almost always takes the form of a condemnation: the 'other' is the barbarian. "

" Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly. "

" The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented. "

" Changes in our aesthetic tastes have no value or meaning in and of themselves; what has value and meaning is the idea of change itself. Or, better stated: not change in and of itself, but change as an agent or inspiration of modern creations. "

" The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition. "

" 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. "

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

" The minority of Mexicans who are aware of their own selves do not make up a closed or unchanging class. They are the only active group, in comparison with the Indian-Spanish inertia of the rest, and ever day they are shaping the country more and more into their own image. "

" Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary - or would not be fixity. "

" The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention. "

" In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows. "

" The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American. "

" For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom. "

" 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. "

Octavio Paz

Aim

Time

" Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone. "

" 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. "

" The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. "

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

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

" An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index. "

Octavio Paz

Censorship

Kind

" Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them. "

" I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts. "