Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.
Octavio PazPoetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.
Octavio PazIt is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.
Octavio PazWhat characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.
Octavio PazEvery view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life
Octavio PazToday we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
Octavio Paz