Octavio Paz Quotes

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.

Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.

We yearn for the beautiful, the unknown, and the mysterious.

Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

I could still smell her on my fur. It clung to me, a memory of another world. I was drunk with it, with the scent of her. I'd got too close. The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness. Too close. I couldn't stay away.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

Because when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now.

When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk

Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel.

Nothing feeds a hunger like a thirst

The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.

Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?

What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

We want flesh, flesh for fantasy.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.

Every living person and thing responds to beauty. We all thirst for it. We receive strength and renewal by seeing stirring and satisfying sites.

They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.

I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.

It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you that I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal. To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's because we haven't been able to understand it yet.