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Drugs Are Nihilistic: They Undermine All Values And Radically Overturn All Our Ideas About Good And Evil, What Is Just And What Is Unjust, What Is Permitted And What Is Forbidden.

-Octavio Paz

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Drugs Are Nihilistic: They

Octavio Paz

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Drugs Are Nihilistic: They Undermine All Values And Radically Overturn All Our Ideas About Good And Evil, What Is Just And What Is Unjust, What Is Permitted And What Is Forbidden.

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Every Moment Is Nothing Without End.

The Whole Motley Confusion Of Acts, Omissions, Regrets And Hopes Which Is The Life Of Each One Of Us Finds In Death, Not Meaning Or Explanation, But An End.

Drugs Are Nihilistic: They Undermine All Values And Radically Overturn All Our Ideas About Good And Evil, What Is Just And What Is Unjust, What Is Permitted And What Is Forbidden.

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By Diminishing The Value Of Silence, Publicity Has Also Diminished That Of Language. The Two Are Inseparable: Knowing How To Speak Has Always Meant Knowing How To Keep Silent, Knowing That There Are Times When One Should Say Nothing.

The Purpose Of Poetry Is To Restore To Mankind The Possibility To Wonder.

For Every Language That Becomes Extinct, An Image Of Man Disappears.

It Is Not Proper To Project Our Feelings Onto Things Or To Attribute Our Own Sensations And Passions To Them. Can It Also Be Improper To See In Them A Guide, A Way Of Life? To Learn The Art Of Remaining Motionless Amid The Agitation Of The Whirlwind, To Learn To Remain Still And To Be As Transparent As This Fixed Light Amid The Frantic Branches This May Be A Program For Life.

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The Religion Of Art, Like The Religion Of Politics, Was Born From The Ruins Of Christianity. Art Inherited From The Old Religion The Power Of Consecrating Things And Endowing Them With A Sort Of Eternity; Museums Are Our Temples, And The Objects Displayed In Them Are Beyond History. Politics--or More Precisely, Revolution--co-opted The Other Function Of Religion: Changing Human Beings And Society. Art Was An Asceticism, A Spiritual Heroism; Revolution Was The Construction Of A Universal Church.

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.

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Today 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.

If Society Abolishes Poetry It Commits Spiritual Suicide.

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Loving Means Getting Rid Of Names.

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To Love Is To Battle, To Open Doors, To Cease To Be A Ghost With A Number Forever In Chains, Forever Condemned By A Faceless Master; The World Changes If Two Look At Each Other And See.

Poet: Gardener Of Epitaphs.

Solitude Is The Profoundest Fact

Love Is The Revelation Of The Other Person's Freedom.

Poetry Is Not Truth, It Is The Resurrection Of Presences.

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Enormous And Solid But Swaying, Beaten By The Wind But Chained, Murmur Of A Million Leaves Against My Window. Riot Of Trees, Surge Of Dark Green Sounds. The Grove, Suddenly Still, Is A Web Of Fronds And Branches.

Art Is What Remains Of Religion: The Dance Above The Yawning Abyss.

Deserve Your Dream.

If Each Of My Words Were A Drop Of Water, You Would See Through Them And Glimpse What I Feel: Gratitude, Acknowledgement.

Because Two Bodies, Naked And Entwined, Leap Over Time, They Are Invulnerable, Nothing Can Touch Them, They Return To The Source. There Is No You, No I, No Tomorrow, No Yesterday, No Names, The Truth Of Two In A Single Body, A Single Soul, Oh Total Being.

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.

Surrealism Is Not A School Of Poetry But A Movement Of Liberation... A Way Of Rediscovering The Language Of Innocence, A Renewal Of The Primordial Pact, Poetry Is The Basic Text, The Foundation Of The Human Order. Surrealism Is Revolutionary Because It Is A Return To The Beginning Of All Beginnings.

When We Learn To Speak, We Learn To Translate.

Grace Is Gratuitous; It Is A Gift.

The Mexican...is Familiar With Death. [he] Jokes About It, Caresses It, Sleeps With It, Celebrates It. It Is One Of His Favorite Toys And His Most Steadfast Love.

Reality Is A Staircase Going Neither Up Nor Down, We Don't Move; Today Is Today, Always Is Today.

I Sat At The Foot Of A Huge Tree, A Statue Of The Night, And Tried To Make An Inventory Of All I Had Seen, Heard, Smelled, And Felt: Dizziness, Horror, Stupor, Astonishment, Joy, Enthusiasm, Nausea, Inescapable Attraction. What Had Attracted Me? It Was Difficult To Say: Human Kind Cannot Bear Much Reality.

What Characterizes A Poem Is Its Necessary Dependence On Words As Much As Its Struggle To Transcend Them.

Listen To Me As One Listens To The Rain, The Years Go By, The Moments Return, Do You Hear The Footsteps In The Next Room? Not Here, Not There: You Hear Them In Another Time That Is Now, Listen To The Footsteps Of Time, Inventor Of Places With No Weight, Nowhere, Listen To The Rain Running Over The Terrace, The Night Is Now More Night In The Grove, Lightning Has Nestled Among The Leaves, A Restless Garden Adrift-go In, Your Shadow Covers This Page.

What Sets Worlds In Motion Is The Interplay Of Differences, Their Attractions And Repulsions; Life Is Plurality, Death Is Uniformity.

A Civilization That Denies Death Ends By Denying Life.

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