Pablo Neruda Quotes

While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone.

You will fall with me as a stone in the grave

So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,so close that your eyes close with my sleep.

You came to my lifewith what you were bringing,madeof light and bread and shadow I expected you,and Like this I need you,Like this I love you,and to those who want to hear tomorrowthat which I will not tell them, let them read it here,and let them back off today because it is earlyfor these arguments.

Pablo Neruda

I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.

Pablo Neruda

Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.

Pablo Neruda

I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you

Pablo Neruda

Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly

Pablo Neruda

Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.

Pablo Neruda

Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.

Pablo Neruda

I learned about lifefrom life itself,love I learned in a single kissand could teach no one anythingexcept that I have livedwith something in common among men.

Pablo Neruda

I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you,From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.

Pablo Neruda

Your eyes have the colour of the moon,

Pablo Neruda

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables.

Pablo Neruda

Sonnet LXXXI And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember. No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon. Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move after, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Pablo Neruda

In one kiss, you'll know all I haven't said.

Pablo Neruda

And so this letter endswith no sadness:my feet are firm upon the earth,my hand writes this letter on the road,and in the midst of life I shall bealwaysbeside the friend, facing the enemy,with your name on my mouthand a kiss that neverbroke away from yours.

Pablo Neruda

and everything burned in blue, everything a star

Pablo Neruda

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

Pablo Neruda

Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that formsthe fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweedsfilled your body with joy, and your luminous eyesand your mouth that has the smile of the water.A black yearning sun is braided into the strandsof your black mane, when you stretch your arms.You play with the sun as with a little brookand it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.

Pablo Neruda

It’s well known that he who returns never left

Pablo Neruda

Do tears not yet spilledwait in small lakes?Or are they invisible riversthat run toward sadness?

Pablo Neruda

Every day you play with the light of the universe.

Pablo Neruda

Fear envelops bones like new skin,envelops blood with night’s skin,the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet -it is not your hair but the terror in your head,like long hair made of vertical nails,and what you see are not shattered streets,but rather, within you, your own crushed walls,your frustrated infinity, again the city comescrashing down: in your silence, only water’s threatis heard, and in the waterdrowned horses gallop through your death.

Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... 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, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me.

Pablo Neruda

To harden the earththe rocks took charge:instantlythey grew wings:the rocksthat soared:the survivorsflew upthe lightning bolt,screamed in the night,a watermark,a violet sword,a meteor.The succulentskyhad not only clouds,not only space smelling of oxygen,but an earthly stoneflashing here and therechanged into a dove,changed into a bell,into immensity, into a piercingwind:into a phosphorescent arrow,into salt of the sky.

Pablo Neruda

At night I dream that you and I are two plantsthat 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

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad netstowards your oceanic eyes.There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,its arms turning like a drowning man's.I send out red signals across your absent eyesthat smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.You keep only darkness, my distant female,from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad netsto that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.The birds of night peck at the first starsthat flash like my soul when I love you.The night gallops on its shadowy mareshedding blue tassels over the land.

Pablo Neruda

I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.

Pablo Neruda

Por que en las epocas oscurasse escribe con tinta invisible?Why in the darkest agesdo they write with invisible ink?

Pablo Neruda

Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?

Pablo Neruda

So that you will hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.Necklace, drunken bellfor your hands smooth as grapes.And I watch my words from a long way off.They are more yours than mine.They climb on my old suffering like ivy.It climbs the same way on damp walls.You are to blame for this cruel sport.They are fleeing from my dark lair.You fill everything, you fill everything.Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,and they are more used to my sadness than you are.Now I want them to say what I want to say to youto make you hear as I want you to hear me.The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.You listen to other voices in my painful voice.Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.But my words become stained with your love.You occupy everything, you occupy everything.I am making them into an endless necklacefor your white hands, smooth as grapes.

Pablo Neruda

I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait

Pablo Neruda

Die slowlyHe who becomes the slave of habit,who follows the same routes every day,who never changes pace,who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,who does not speak and does not experience,dies slowly.He or she who shuns passion,who prefers black on white,dotting ones "it’s" rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,that turn a yawn into a smile,that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,dies slowly.He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,who is unhappy at work,who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,to thus follow a dream,those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,die slowly.He who does not travel, who does not read,who does not listen to music,who does not find grace in himself,she who does not find grace in herself,dies slowly.He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,who does not allow himself to be helped,who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,dies slowly.He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, he or she who don't reply when they are asked something they do know,die slowly.Let's try and avoid death in small doses,reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.Only a burning patience will leadto the attainment of a splendid happiness.

Pablo Neruda

Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

Pablo Neruda

I remember you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.

Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.To hear the immense night, still more immense without her,And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.

Pablo Neruda

If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on.I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die.I shall live on.For where a man has no voice,there, my voice.Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them.When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind.No, forgive me.If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.

Pablo Neruda

I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed eyes

Pablo Neruda

LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreLI want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

Pablo Neruda

I love you like the plant that does not bloomand carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,

Pablo Neruda

Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadowswhere you accompany me in your dreamsand tell me the hour of light.

Pablo Neruda

I know you exist not just because your eyes flyand give light to things like an open window

Pablo Neruda

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?What primal night does Man touch with his senses?Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:Love is a war of lightning,and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,and a genital fire, transformed by delight,slips through the narrow channels of bloodto precipitate a nocturnal carnation,to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

Pablo Neruda

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my armsAnd my roots will set off to seek another land

Pablo Neruda

Do you not hear the constant victory,in the human footraceof time, slow as fire,sure, and thick and Herculeanaccumulating its volume and adding its sad fiber?

Pablo Neruda

I want to see the thirstinside the syllablesI want to touch the firein the sound:I want to feel the darknessof the cry. I wantwords as roughas virgin rocks.” - Verb.

Pablo Neruda

The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light.

Pablo Neruda

Como se reparten el sol en el naranjo las naranjas?How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree?

Pablo Neruda

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,you look like a world, lying in surrender.My rough peasant's body digs in youand makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion.To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flowsand weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

Pablo Neruda

I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair

Pablo Neruda

I touched you and my life stopped

Pablo Neruda

Oh invade me with your scalding mouth,search me if you like, with your nocturnal eyes,but allow me to sail and sleep upon your name.

Pablo Neruda

Love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes.

Pablo Neruda

I love the piece of earth you are,because in all the planetary prairiesI do not have another star. You repeatthe multiplication of the universe.

Pablo Neruda

beyond the earth and the shadowthe brightness of our love will stay alive

Pablo Neruda

I repeated: come with me, as if I were dying,and no one saw in my mouth the moon that was bleeding,no one saw the blood that was rising into the silence.Oh love, now let us forget the star with thorns!

Pablo Neruda

Of so much moon were your hips to me,of all the sun your deep mouth and its delight,of so much burning light like honey in the shade

Pablo Neruda

I love you without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,I love you directly without problems or pride:I love you this way because I know no other way to love,

Pablo Neruda

I cannot quit your love without dying.

Pablo Neruda

1 2 3 Next