Pablo Neruda Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

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

Pablo Neruda
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.

Pablo Neruda
And our problems will crumble apart, the soul / blow through like a wind, and here where we live will all be clean again, with fresh bread on the table.

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

Pablo Neruda
Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness, and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

Pablo Neruda
By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness

Pablo Neruda
I like on the table, when we're speaking, the light of a bottle of intelligent wine.

Pablo Neruda
The night is shattered, and the blue stars shiver in the distance.

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
From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands and establishes roots that are watered by weeping.

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

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

Pablo Neruda