The indecipherable dust, once Shakespeare.
I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don’t like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes – I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don’t look too closely at them.
When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses’ oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.
Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legend recreates it in a manner which is only accidentally false and which allows it to go about the world, from mouth to mouth.
I’m sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven’t read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I’m sick and tired of it.
Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader’s own features and it is also a map of the world. Moreover, all this must come about in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author, who must appear to be ignorant of any and all symbolism.
He was the solitary lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.
Todos los hechos pueden ocurrirle a un hombre, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte, han sido prefijados por el. Asi, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillacion una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio. No hay consuelo mas habil que el pensamiento de que hemos elegido nuestras desdichas.
O Time thy pyramids.
Borelius inquires mockingly: “Why didn’t he renounce his renunciation? Or renounce the idea of renouncing his renunciation?
I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow – the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
I don’t speak of vengeance, nor of forgiving; forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.
In the depths of the siesta amorous doves called huskily;.
Every so many years, he went to England to visit – judging by the photographs he showed us – a sundial and some oak trees.
In the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.
Words are symbols that assume a shared memory. The memory I now want to set down is mine alone; all those who share it have died. The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors, none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn.
Scattered through the ordinary world, there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.
The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force. All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does.
In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have had to retrace my steps by way of the shadows.