Octavio Paz Quotes

Words are illusions.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

I'm a victim of my metaphors.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.