The Book of Questions
Quotes from the Book
I want To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Then love knew it was called love. And when I lifted my eyes to your name, suddenly your heart showed me my way
I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.
sometimes i get up at dawn, and even my soul is wet.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.
The morning is full of storm in the heart of summer. The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye, the wind, travelling, waving them in its hands. The numberless heart of the wind beating above our loving silence. Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees like a language full of wars and songs.
Tonight I Can Write Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. The night is starry and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer. My heart looks for her, and she is not with me. The same night whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same. I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing. Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses. Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.
The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.
About Pablo Neruda
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Keep reading
Memories
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Meditations in an Emergency
100 Love Sonnets
Collected Poems
Selected Poems
Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
This Is How You Lose the Time War
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
Love & Misadventure
Book of Longing
Thirst
The Dark Between Stars
The Collected Poems
Poems, 1962-2012
The Chaos of Longing
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Ariel
Lullabies
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
Sonnets from the Portuguese
The Waves
The Complete Poems
Love, in English
The Complete Poems
Selected Poems
Howl and Other Poems
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Nejma
Red Bird
Letters to Milena
Our Infinite Fates
Leaves of Grass
The Anatomy of Being
A Certain Slant of Light
100 Selected Poems
Honeybee
The Madness Vase
Yesterday I Was the Moon
The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
2am thoughts
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
If You Find Me
Crossed
Gabriel's Inferno
53 Letters for My Lover
Stardust and Sheets
New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2
The Siren
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
eighteen years
First Love
No Matter the Wreckage: Poems
Written on the Body
In the Wild Light
Les Fleurs du Mal

