Mexican - Poet | March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998
A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.
Octavio Paz
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We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.
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Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.
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Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.
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Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
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Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly.
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Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.
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Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.
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For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.
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