The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror and its creature.
Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.
Solitude is the profoundest fact.
My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped.
The world is born when two people kiss.
Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone’s path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.
Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.
Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.
To fight evil is to fight ourselves.
Light is time thinking about itself.
There is nothing sacred or untouchable except the freedom to think. Without criticism, that is to say, without rigor and experimentation, there is no science, without criticism there is no art or literature. I would also say that without criticism there is no healthy society.
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don’t move; today is today, always is today.
Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall-that of our consciousness-between the world and ourselves.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.
Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.