Pablo Neruda Quotations

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

Take it all back. Life is boring, except for flowers, sunshine, your perfect legs. A glass of cold water when you are really thirsty. The way bodies fit together. Fresh and young and sweet. Coffee in the morning. These are just moments. I struggle with the in-betweens. I just want to never stop loving like there is nothing else to do, because what else is there to do?

Perhaps the earth can teach us As when everything seems dead And later proves to be alive

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

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

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.

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

But from each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies.

I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.

Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.

Quiero hacer contigoLo que primavera hace con los cerazos

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way.

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated /that had been sleeping in your soul.

I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topazor arrow of carnations that propagate fire:I love you as one loves certain dark things,secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit.

It's hard to tell / if we close our eyes or if night / opens in us other starred eyes, / if it burrows into the wall of our dream / till some other door opens. / But the dream is only the flitting costume of one moment, / is spent in one beat / of the darkness, / and falls at our feet, cast off / as the day stirs and sails away with us.

Hate is like a swordfish, working through water invisibly and then you see it coming with blood along its blade, but transparency disarms it.

Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!

Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicet of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop...

De pronto no puedo decirte lo que yo te debo decir, hombre,perdóname; sabrás que aunque no escuches mis palabras no me eché a llorar ni a dormir y que contigo estoy sin verte desde hace tiempo y hasta el fin. I can't just suddenly tell you what I should be telling you, friend, forgive me; you know that although you don't hear my words, I wasn't asleep or in tears, that I am with you without seeing you for a good long time and until the end.

Today is today, and yesterday is gone. There is no doubt.

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.

I was the owner of my own darkness.

Over your breasts of motionless current, over your legs of firmness and water, over the permanence and the pride of your naked hair I want to be, my love, now that the tears are thrown into the raucous baskets where they accumulate, I want to be, my love, alone with a syllable of mangled silver, alone with a tip of your breast of snow.

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.

To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know ... widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

O happy childhood! blessed youth! But once we know thy potent power; But once we live all careless free; No cross to mar our love-lit bower.

La heradera del dia destruida. (The heiress of the destroyed day.)

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it?

Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss.

Poetry is an act of peace.

Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.

For now I ask no more Than the justice of eating.

You are like nobody since I love you.

When everything seems to be set to show me off as intelligent, the fool I always keep hidden takes over all that I say.

I want to see thirst In the syllables, Tough fire In the sound; Feel through the dark For the scream.

Perhaps this war will pass like the others which divided us leaving us dead, killing us along with the killers but the shame of this time puts its burning fingers to our faces. Who will erase the ruthlessness hidden in innocent blood?

Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

From scarlet to powdered gold, to blazing yellow, to the rare ashen emerald, to the orange and black velvet of your shimmering corselet, out to the tip that like an amber thorn begins you, small, superlative being, you are a miracle, and you blaze

I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul You live again in time, slender and silent.

O merry, merry, merry, like only dogs know how to be happy and nothing more, with an absolute shameless nature.

Love has to be…flowering like the stars, and measureless as a kiss.

Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth...

While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

I want to do for you what the spring does for the cherry trees

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

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

We bear the sole, relentless tenderness.

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.

A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory.

Latin America is very fond of the word "hope." We like to be called the "continent of hope." Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves "candidates of hope." This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century.

I've come within range of hate. Terrifying, its tremors, its dizzying obsessions. Hate's like a swordfish invisible in the water, knifing suddenly into sight with blood on its blade- clear water misleads you.

Then Scale by scale, We strip off The delicacy And eat The peaceful mush Of its green heart.

I think it was very informative, but a lot still needs to be done.

When your hands leap towards mine, love, what do they bring me in flight?

I spin on the circle of wave upon wave of the sea.

I had no more alphabet than the journeying of the swallows, the pure and tiny water of the small, fiery bird that dances rising from the pollen.

Love is a clash of lightnings

Como se reparten el sol en el naranjo las naranjas? How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree?

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus able to discover Spain?

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.

Que sigue pagando el otono con tanto dinero amarillo? What does autumn go on paying for with so much yellow money?

Whom can I ask what I came to make happen in this world? Why do I move without wanting to, why am I not able to sit still? Why do I go rolling without wheels, flying without wings or feathers, and why did I decide to migrate if my bones live in Chile?

Your house sounds like a train at midday, the wasps buzz, the saucepans sing, the waterfall enumerates the deeds of the dew . . .

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach; may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance. Don't leave me for a second, my dearest.

He who has nothing—it has been said many times—has nothing to lose but his chains.

How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?

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

I want to see the thirst inside the syllables I want to touch the fire in the sound: I want to feel the darkness of the cry. I want words as rough as virgin rocks.” - Verb.

...the best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread: the local baker....

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.

As slippery as smooth grapes, words exploding in the light like dormant seeds waiting in the vaults of vocabulary, alive again, and giving life: once again the heart distills them.

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

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair....

She did not speak for speech was unknown to her.

Two things make a story. The net and the air that falls through the net.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood - and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

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

For me writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.

And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it has no name.

About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you

There's a country spread out in the sky, a credulous carpet of rainbows and crepuscular plants: I move toward it just a bit haggardly, trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade to dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

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.

Love is short, but forgetting is long.

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence....