Pablo Neruda Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

Don't you know there is no one in the streets
and no one in the houses?

There are only eyes in the windows.
If you don't have a place to sleep,
knock on a door and it will open,
open up to a certain point
and you will see that it is cold inside,
and that that house is empty
and wants nothing to do with you,
your stories mean nothing,
and if you insist on being gentle,
the dog and the cat will bite you.

Pablo Neruda
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

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

Pablo Neruda
Using language like clothes or the skin on your body, with its sleeves, its patches, its transpirations, and its blood and sweat stains, that's what shows a writer's mettle. This is style.

Pablo Neruda
Only do not forget, if I wake up crying it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands....

Pablo Neruda
You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Pablo Neruda
When I sleep every night, what am I called or not called? And when I wake, who am I if I was not I while I slept?

Pablo Neruda
Night, snow, and sand make up the form
of my thin country,
all silence lies in its long line,
all foam flows from its marine beard,
all coal covers it with mysterious kisses.

Pablo Neruda
Someone will ask later, sometimes searching for a name, his own or someone's else's why I neglected his sadness or his love... But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone. Or maybe it was the strain of the city, of time the cold heart of the clocks...

Pablo Neruda
Bitter love, a violet with its crown of thorns in a thicket of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?

Pablo Neruda
Raw hatred took its time making an outpost of its rage and prepared for me a savage crown with rusty, bloodstained spikes. It wasn't pride that made me keep my heart at a distance from such terror, nor did I waste on revenge or the pursuit of power the forces that came from my selfish griefs or my accumulated joys. It was something else-my helplessness.

Pablo Neruda
If you should ask me where I've been all this time
I have to say "Things happen."
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration:
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead?

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

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

Pablo Neruda
But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.

Pablo Neruda
I have gone marking the blank atlas of your body
with crosses of fire.
My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide.
In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.

Pablo Neruda
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.

Pablo Neruda
And what has become of it, where is that onetime love? Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain.

Pablo Neruda
I can live only in my own country. I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and my ear against it, without feeling the movement of its waters and its shadows, without feeling my roots reach down into its soil for maternal nourishment.

Pablo Neruda
What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?

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
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
I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us.

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

Pablo Neruda