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" Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies. "

Octavio Paz

Universal

Play

Motion

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

" 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. "

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

" It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? "

" The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words. "

" Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now. "

" 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. "

" Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different. "

" 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. "

" Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing. "

" A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work. "

" Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary. "

" For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. "

" We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history. "

Octavio Paz

Seems

History

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

" When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant. "

" If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time. "

" Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth. "

" Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil. "