Quotes by Pablo Neruda

Come With Me, I Said, And No One Knew (VII)

Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!

That is why when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Laughter is the language of the soul.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

las lágrimas que no se lloran
esperan en pequeños lagos?

o serán ríos invisibles
que corren hacia la tristesa?

por qué se suicidan las hojas
cuando se sienten amarillas?

Enigmas
      
You've asked me what the lobster is weaving
there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparentbell?
What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards
a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone,
and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand
the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this,
that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes
time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shore of silence or where the storm has passed rampaging like a train. There the faint signs are left, coins of time and water, debris ,celestial ash and the irreplaceable rapture of sharing in the labour of soitude in the sand.

Is 4 the same 4 for everybody?
Are all sevens equal?

When the convict ponders the light
is it the same light that shines on you?

Will Czechoslovakians or turtles be born from your ashes?