Pablo Neruda Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Pablo Neruda
Only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind. In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.

Pablo Neruda
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

Pablo Neruda
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

Pablo Neruda
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart.

Pablo Neruda
Today let me forget this happiness, wider than all the sea,
because man is wider than all the sea and her necklace of islands
and we must fall into him as down a well to clamber back with
branches of secret water, recondite truths.

Pablo Neruda
The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
And flew through the lips and the mouth.

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

Pablo Neruda
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Pablo Neruda
Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair.

Pablo Neruda
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.

Pablo Neruda
And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

Pablo Neruda
The dark of a day gone by
Grown fat on our grieving blood.

Pablo Neruda
I am alone with rickety materials,
the rain falls on me, and it is like me,
it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world,
repulsed as it falls, and with no persistent form.

Pablo Neruda
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.

Pablo Neruda
And I, a materialist who does not believe in the starry heaven promised to a human being, for this dog and for every dog I believe in heaven, yes, I believe in a heaven that I will never enter, but he waits for me wagging his big fan of a tail so I, soon to arrive, will feel welcomed.

Pablo Neruda
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body... and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

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

Pablo Neruda
The tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.

Pablo Neruda
And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world.

Pablo Neruda
Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist summit, drops of when and how, vague comings and goings: between lips and lips as along a shore of sand and glass the wind passes.

Pablo Neruda