Pablo Neruda, excerpt from The Saddest Poem.
(via wordsnquotes)
…I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.”
I have tried to be faithful to my knowledge, to force my instincts to yield, and realized that it is no use wielding the weapons of nothingness if you cannot turn them against yourself.
Emil Cioran, “Cosmogony of Desire,” A Short History of Decay (via heteroglossia)
(Source: kingbebop)
The wise man will have no anger towards sinners because he knows that no one is born wise and only becomes so. He knows that only a few in every age turn out wise and having grasped the conditions of human life he knows that no man can be angry with nature.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De Ira (On Anger)
Delmira Agustini, tr. by Alejandro Cáceres, from Poems; Poetics of Eros: “The Ineffable,” (x)
No standard exists for the peculiarity and ridiculousness of things, not even one that is unspeakable or unknowable, words which are merely a front or a subterfuge. These qualities - the peculiar and the ridiculous - are immanent and absolute in all existence and would be in any conceivable existent order…
Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco