Author

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.

From Octavio Paz

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

From Octavio Paz

The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented.

From Octavio Paz

A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.

From Octavio Paz

The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.

From Octavio Paz

The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism: what is new is set over and against what is old, and it is this constant contrast that constitutes the continuity of tradition.

From Octavio Paz

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

From Octavio Paz

Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.

From Octavio Paz

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words.

From Octavio Paz

In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.

From Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

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