Great Throughts Treasury

"The poetic process is not different from conjuration, enchantment, and other magical procedures. And the poet's attitude is very similar to the magician's. Both utilize the principle of analogy; both act for utilitarian and immediate ends: they do not ask themselves what language or nature is, but use them for their own purposes. It is not difficult to add another trait: magicians and poets, unlike philosophers, technicians, and sages, draw their powers from themselves. To do their work it is not enough for them to possess a body of knowledge, as is the case with a physicist or a chauffeur. Every magical operation requires an inner force, achieved by a painful effort at purification."

"The proximity of death creates an atmosphere for the exceptional favors (and grow over the human condition)"

"The rebel, unlike the revolutionary, does not attempt to undermine the social order as a whole. The rebel attacks the tyrant; the revolutionary attacks tyranny. I grant that there are rebels who regard all governments as tyrannical; nonetheless, it is abuses that they condemn, not power itself. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, are convinced that the evil does not lie in the excesses of the constituted order but in order itself. The difference, it seems to me, is considerable."

"The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics?or more precisely, Revolution?co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church."

"The second way out is through love: complacency and acceptance .. freely beloved person. Is it madness or illusion? Maybe, but the only door to get out of jail jealousy. I wrote many years ago: the virtue of love without sacrifice, and today I say: Love foolish bet for freedom, does not own my freedom, but the freedom of others."

"The word of man is the child's death. Speak because we are mortals: the words are not signs. Son years. They say ?When they say the names that say. say time: tell us .? Weathermen us . Chatting is human."

"The Spaniards also abuse the strong expressions. In front of them is uniquely Mexican neat. But while the Spaniards indulge in blasphemy and scatology, we specialize in cruelty and sadism. Spanish is simple: insults God because he believes in it. Blasphemy, Stained says, is a prayer backwards. The pleasure experienced by many Spaniards, including some of its most senior poets, referring to the detriments and mix with the holy shit looks a little bit like children playing with mud... The motherfucker is the offspring of the rape, kidnapping or derision. IF this expression with the Spanish, motherfucker is compared, the difference is immediately obvious. Shame for Spanish is son of a woman who voluntarily delivers a prostitute; for Mexico, is to be the result of a rape."

"There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot."

"The triumph of the principles on instincts."

"The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end."

"The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves."

"There is no doubt that today reads more than before. Does it read better? I doubt it. Distraction is our usual state. No distraction that moves away from the world to get into the secret of his country and moving fantasy, but of one who is always beside himself, lost in the daily average and senseless agitation. A thousand things at once asking for our attention and none of them manages to keep us; life becomes so we sand between your toes and hours smoke in the brain."

"To fight evil is to fight ourselves."

"To love is to undress our names."

"To love is to battle, to open doors. The world changes if two can look at each other and see."

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears."

"To the people of New York, Paris, or London, "death" is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, however, frequents it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and most steadfast love. Of course, in his attitude perhaps there is as much fear as there is in one of the others; at least he does not hide it; he confronts it face to face with patience, disdain, or irony."

"Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once."

"Two bodies face to face."

"What does the pilgrim walking his homeland? The place of birth or your order? Maybe seek your destiny. Maybe your destination is searched."

"We love to silence the poet has one salvation - it."

"We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence."

"What does one who journeys in a foreign land find traveling back to her native country? The place of her birth or of her end? Perhaps she is searching for her destiny. Perhaps her destiny is to search."

"Watching I watch myself what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts what I watch watches me I am the creation of what I see"

"What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism."

"When a society decays, it is first language to become that is gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings."

"What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity."

"When we learn to speak, we learn to translate."

"Why today people say so easily yes? Loneliness ... They fear the loneliness of no! You know it is very easy to fall into the river and, without doing anything, let yourself be seduced by the Stream! 's very hard to resist. Therefore honor dissidents wherever they are. Whoever says no is a dissident! In a society accommodated to agree, one who disagrees with diversity brighten the dull uniformity? If you want, This was the death of the artist in our time ... The artists stopped resisting ... ceased to be trans no of their time. 'Thus they became commodities sold off the shelf consumption's art with no 'shows a world that says anything yes, what is the future. Unfortunately today the art says only yes and so I do not have contact with the future. Yes, but so is as some support, contact with the general public ... But the role of art is not to have contact with the general public... The art is light to dark and dark to light not! On the yes of the art all that succeeds is to flatter the audience! With flattery are not moving ... We stand on the same spot, we see in the mirror and admire oneself. -What do we proceed? With the continuous review! The flattery of the public is the death of art and the elimination of loneliness of the artist. To see the future, we must not be guided by the taste of the public."

"Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society."

"Yes, I know, I could settle down in an idea, in a custom, in an obsession. Or stretch out on the coals of a pain or some hope and wait there, not making much noise. Of course it's not so bad: I eat, drink, sleep, make love, observe the marked holidays and go to the beach in summer. People like me and I like them. I take my condition lightly: sickness, insomnia, nightmares, social gatherings, the idea of death, the little worm that burrows into the heart or the liver (the little worm that leaves its eggs in the brain and at night pierces the deepest sleep), the future at the expense of today ? the today that never comes on time, that always loses its bets. No. I renounce my ration card, my I.D., my birth certificate, voter's registration, passport, code number, countersign, credentials, safe conduct pass, insignia, tattoo, brand."

"You are you and your body of steam, you and your face of night, you and your hair, unhurried lightning, you cross the street and enter my forehead, footsteps of water across my eyes, listen to me as one listens to the rain."

"Without democracy, freedom is a chimera."