Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair .
Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso; Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look at a few of his great quotes:
On Love:
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
(From: Saddest Poem)
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Ah our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
(From: Love)
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.
In this part of the story I am the one who
dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.
On Learning:
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
Other Quotes:
We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
My feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living.
Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
it’s only because in my dream I’m a lost child
hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands.