Octavio Paz Quotes

Octavio Paz — Mexican Poet born on March 31, 1914, died on April 19, 1998

Octavio Paz Lozano (Spanish pronunciation: audio (help·info); March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet-diplomat and writer. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century and one of the greatest Hispanic poets of all time... (wikipedia)

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

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.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.

The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.

Octavio Paz Quotes

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