Vicente Aleixandre > Quotes

“In the deepest nights
words left behind or asleep
may find their connections.
In scattered papers, who knows or forgets them?
Someday perhaps they’ll resonate—who knows?—
in a few sympathetic hearts.”
― Vicente Aleixandre

“I would say a few words
in your ear. A doubtful man has little faith.
Live a long time and it gets dark, and suddenly you know you don’t
know yourself.
But I’d say them even so. Since my eyes repeat what they take in:
your beauty, your name, the river’s sound, the woods, the soul on its own.”
― Vicente Aleixandre

“After the dead words,
after the ones still said and spoken,
what do you expect? Some flying leaves,
more scattered papers. Who knows?
Some dissolving
words, like the light or the echo dying out there in the great night.”
― Vicente Aleixandre

“I move and, circling, seek myself, O center, O center,
road, voyagers of the world, of the future existing
beyond the seas, in my pulse-beat.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Un pájaro de papel en el pecho
dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado”
― Vicente Aleixandre, La destrucción o el amor. Sombra del paraíso

“He lay there watching at the end; he watched and wanted so much
to speak.
Some faded letters appeared over his lips.
Love. Yes, I was in love. I've loved . I loved so much.
He lifted his frail, wise hand and suddenly
a bird was flying in the bedroom. His breath kept saying, I loved so
much.
Outside the black, night window the lights sent a glow
over his mouth that had stopped drinking from that worn out life.
He opened his eyes. He put his hand to his chest and said:
Listen to me!
No one could hear a thing. A strange smile lowered its smooth
mask like a veil
over his face, rubbing it out.
There was a little wind. Listen to me! Everyone, everyone strained
their delicate ears.
Listen! And they heard it-pure and crystal tone-the silence.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Wrap me up in the reddest cloak, in that flight of your tendons, and lead me into another kingdom, into the heroic ability to love, into the combination to every safe, into the wild dice you feel in your sad fingers when roses shipwreck next to the bridge of salvation. When there's nothing you can do.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“I have such a dark mission, loving you.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“If I die, leave me alone. Don't sing to me. Bury me wrapped in the deck I leave behind, in that lovely treasure that will know how to strum me like a sure hand. I’ll sound like a fragrance from the depths, very grave. I 'll rise to your ears, and from there, turned into pure vegetation, I 'll debunk myself, untelling my own story, my own plot, Rowing back into my mouth left ajar, into the Dream that keeps on swallowing and, like a cardboard mask, won 't cough me up.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“I'm as quiet as a taut bow, and all for the sake of ignoring you, oh night of cardinal spaces, of torrential silence and lava.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Did I know who I was, or did I just learn to forget myself?”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“You are the calling of lovers, the signals
that silently appeal to one another in the dark.
Sky with rubbed out stars, you give yourself,
like a warm field, to these noiseless wings.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“There are moments of loneliness
when the astonished heart realizes it feels no love.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Deeper, much deeper, the fire purifies.
It is the wilderness fire to which no one descends.
An exile, forbidden to souls, forbidden to shadows.
Bowels that burn with an unholy solitude.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“yes, I know what you loved,
brooding by the shore,
your cheek in your still-damp hand,
thinking,

—Vicente Aleixandre, from “Tragic Destiny,” A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“I love you, yes, oh Shivering One!”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“That profound darkness where weeping doesn't exist.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Fertile ether where the destruction of worlds
is a single heart that burns itself out with love.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“And the noise
has turned into waves of blood inside the heart.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“They fall and endure.
They live.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Podemos por ello afirmar que la enfermedad, de alguna forma, le conduce a la poesía, o prepara el camino para su total desarrollo.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, Poesía completa: Edición de Alejandro Sanz

“Maybe I can feel today because I’m dying.
And my last words will be: I felt.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“For you and everything alive inside of you,
I write, and write.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Human bodies, exhausted rocks, gray sacks
on the seashore, you always understand that life
never ends-it just inherits itself.
You endlessly repeated bodies roll out every morning
like a slow and disenchanted wave.
Human flesh forever, no light! Always rolled
from over there, from a sourceless ocean that sends out
wave on wave, the swells, the tired bodies, the borders
of a sea that never quits, that gasps on its shores, forever.

All of you, innumerable, cloned, over and over, heaping up your
flesh,
your lives, without hope, all monotonously the same under the
sullen skies that feel nothing and repeat.
That sea never ceases pouring out the bodies, and they break here,
roundly, and lie dying on the beaches.
And no one sees that swift ship; no one sees it, the quick sail
whose steel bow could slant and slice
and open up the luminous blood and then race off
into the deep horizon, toward the last
source of life, the boundary of the eternal sea
that pours out these gray
human corpses. Toward the light, toward that rising ladder of
bright things
that climbs from a loving breast to a mouth, ascending,
to some huge, full eyes that watch us,
to some silent, bounded hands that make a prison
where we’re still being born, charged with energy, always tired.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“And so eternity was the minute.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“But suddenly you got up.
You had felt the dark wings,
magic token from the depths that calls out to our hearts.
You stared at the murmur that now starts in the depths.
What shapes did you imagine? What sacred symbols,
what precise words did the surf speak,
sweet saliva from secret lips
that open slightly, naming, mesmerizing, stealing away?
The message said . . .”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Love is a momentary destruction, a combustion that threatens
the pure creature we love, the one who's wounded in our fire.
But after we've pulled away from her unraveled flames
and looked at her, we see clearly the new, re-formed and flawless life,
the quiet, warm life that called to us from the sweet surface of her body.
Here is love's perfect vessel, filled
and overflowing with its serene and glistening golden blood.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“And let the clean space shine
in the hands of its captor
the slow, elegant, daily
drinker of the waves.”
― Vicente Aleixandre, A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems

“Pero otro día toco tu mano. Mano tibia...
Tu delicada mano silente. A veces cierro
mis ojos y toco leve tu mano, leve toque
que comprueba su forma, que tienta
su estructura, sintiendo bajo la piel alada el duro hueso
insobornable, el triste hueso adonde no llega nunca
el amor. Oh carne dulce, que sí empapa del amor hermoso.”
― Vicente Aleixandre

“Allí surtiendo de lo oscuro,
rompiendo de lo oscuro,
serena, pero casi cruel, como una leve diosa recobrada,
hete aquí que ella emerge, sagradamente su ademán extendiendo,
para que la luz del día, la ya gozosa luz que la asalta,
se vierta doradamente viva sobre su palma núbil.”
― Vicente Aleixandre