Pablo Neruda Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

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

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

Pablo Neruda
A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him, and he will certainly miss him.

Pablo Neruda
So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.

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

Pablo Neruda
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda
There are so many people dead
and so many sea-walls that the red sun used to split,
and so many heads that the boats hit,
and so many hands that have closed around kisses,
and so many things I would like to forget.

Pablo Neruda
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.

Pablo Neruda
My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

Pablo Neruda
The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.

Pablo Neruda
It is time, love, to break off that sombre rose,
shut up the stars and bury the ash in the earth;
and, in the rising of the light, wake with those who awoke
or go on in the dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.

Pablo Neruda
So I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.

Pablo Neruda
You will ask: why does your poetry
not speak to us of of sleep, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of your native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

Pablo Neruda
I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter.

Pablo Neruda
Your wide eyes are the only light I know from extinguished constellations.

Pablo Neruda
No, forgive me.
If you are not living,
If you, beloved, my love,
If you
You have died
All the leaves will fall on my breast,
It will rain on my soul night and day,
The snow will burn my heart.

Pablo Neruda
At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined, and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain.

Pablo Neruda
Give me silence, water, hope
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.

Pablo Neruda
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petaled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds.

Pablo Neruda
There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

Pablo Neruda
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent, and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.

Pablo Neruda
With which stars do they go on speaking, the rivers that never reach the sea?

Pablo Neruda
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?

Pablo Neruda
The human crowd has been the lesson of my life. I can come to it with the born timidity of the poet, with the fear of the timid, but once I am in its midst, I feel transfigured. I am part of the essential majority, I am one more leaf on the great human tree.

Pablo Neruda