Pablo Neruda Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

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
Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

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

Pablo Neruda
Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when...

Pablo Neruda
Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star, in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran; love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes, two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey.

Pablo Neruda
If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.

We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.

Pablo Neruda