“In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.”

“—Most distinguished voyager, what was your eon like?—Comic. Terror is forgotten.Only the ridiculous is remembered by posterity.Death from a wound, from a noose, from starvationIs one death, but folly is uncounted and new every year.”

“Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,I felt a door opening in me and I enteredthe clarity of early morning.One after another my former lives were departing,like ships, together with their sorrow.And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seasassigned to my brush came closer,ready now to be described better than they were before.I was not separated from people,grief and pity joined us.We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.For where we come from there is no divisioninto Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth partof the gift we received for our long journey.Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirrorof polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,waiting for a fulfillment.I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,as are all men and women living at the same time,whether they are aware of it or not.”

“You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.”

“When, after a long life, it falls outThat he takes on a form he had soughtAnd every word carved in stoneGrows its hoarfrost, what then? TorchesOf Dionysian choruses in the dark mountainsFrom when he comes. And half of the skyWith its snaky clouds. A mirror before him.In the mirror the already severed, perishingThing.”

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”

“He sang the brightness of mornings and green rivers,He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port,Of tastes of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt.Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon,Of a dignified flock of pelicans above the bay,Of the scent of an armful of lilacs in summer rain,Of his having composed his words always against deathAnd of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness.”