Alejandra Pizarnik Quotes

Maybe someday we will find refuge in true reality. In the meantime, can I just say how opposed I am to all of this? ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Your voice
in this being unable to move away
from my gaze
things dispossess me
make of me a ship on a river of stones
if your voice is not
rain alone in my feverish silence
you unbind my eyes
and please
may you never stop
speaking
ever ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

And it's always the lilac garden on the other side of the river. If the soul should ask you if that is far from here, you should say, On the other side of the river, not this one, but the one over there. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Like a poem that's aware
of the silence of things
you speak so as not to see me ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Behold space trembling like a great madman. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

you have to cry until you break
in order to make or utter a small song,
to scream so much to fill the holes of absence
that's what you did, what I did. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

And the ladies dressed in red for my pain and with my pain latched onto my breath, clinging like the fetuses of scorpions in the deepest crook of my neck, the mothers in red who sucked out the last bit of heat that my barely beating heart could give me - I always had to learn on my own the steps you take to drink and eat and breathe, I was never taught to cry and now will never learn to do this, least of all from the great ladies latched onto the lining of my breath with reddish spit and floating veils of blood, my blood, mine alone, which I drew myself and which they drink from now after murdering the king whose body is listing in the river and who moves his eyes and smiles, though he's dead and when you're dead, you're dead, for all the smiling you do, and the great ladies, the tragic ladies in red have murdered the one who is floating down the river and I stay behind like a hostage in their eternal custody.

I want to die to the letter of the law of the commonplace, where we are assured that dying is the same as dreaming. The light, the forbidden wine, the vertigo. Who is it you write for? The ruins of an abandoned temple. If only celebration were possible. A mournful vision, splintered, of a garden of broken statues.

Numb time, time like a glove upon a drum. The three who compete in me remain on a shifting point and we neither are nor is. My eyes used to find rest in humiliated, forsaken things. Nowadays I see with them; I've seen and approved of no ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

My words demand the silence of a wasteland. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

. . . my fear, my joy more horrible than my fear, my obscene words, my words which are keys locking me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

I don't know how to speak anymore. And with whom?

I never found a soulmate. No one was a dream. They left me with open dreams, with my central wound wide open, with my heart torn. I mourn myself; this is my right. And yet I look down on those who take no interest in me. My only desire has been.

I will not say it. Even I, or especially I, betray myself. Like a nursing boy, my soul has been soothed. I don't know how to speak anymore. I can't speak anymore. I have taken apart, what they never gave me, which was all I had. And it is death again. It closes in on me, it is my only horizon. No one resembles my dream. I have felt love and they mistreated it, yes, me, I who never loved. The deepest love will disappear forever. What can we love that isn't a shadow? The sacred dreams of childhood have already died, and with them, those of nature, which loved me. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Paths of the mirror"

I
And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true.

II
But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp
edge of the night.

III
Like a girl made of pink chalk on a very old wall that is suddenly washed away by the rain.

IV
Like when a flower blooms and reveals the heart that isn't there.

V
Every gesture of my body and my voice to make myself into the offering,
the bouquet that is abandoned by
the wind on the porch.

VI
Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you will be and scare the girl you once were.

VII
The night of us both scattered with the fog. It's the season of cold foods.

VIII
And the thirst, my memory is of the thirst, me underneath, at the bottom, in the hole,
I drank, I remember.

IX
To fall like a wounded animal in a place that was meant to be for revelations.

X
As if it meant nothing. No thing. Mouth zipped. Eyelids sewn. I forgot.
Inside, the wind. Everything closed and the wind inside.

XI
Under the black sun of the silence the words burned slowly.

XII
But the silence is true. That's why I write. I'm alone and I write. No, I'm not alone.
There's somebody here shivering.

XIII
Even if I say sun and moon and star I'm t ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Dusk"

The shadow covers the outer petals
The wind makes off with the final gestures of leaves
The foreign, now twice-silenced sea
inside a summer pitied for its lights

A longing from here
A memory from there ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Your eyes begin in my eyes which no longer see you. Begin in my voice which no longer speaks to you. Die out in my hands which no longer touch you. Your eyes are inscribed in my flesh. No one can bear to see me now. Sinister tattoo. I do the rain, I do the sun. For want of your eyes in my eyes. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

I don't know about birds
nor do I know the history of fire.
But I believe that my solitude should have wings ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

I drank to see him again
at the bottom of your wine ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Sometimes we suffer too much reality in the space of a single night. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Remember it. Remember that I must want it badly. Remember that this is the only thing left to want, in this world wide and deep. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

I speak of something not in this world. I speak of someone whose purpose is elsewhere. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Your bones ache on the brink of morning. You split open. I am warning you and I warned you. You disarm. I tell you and I told you. You undress. You divest. You come undone. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

She undresses in the paradise
of her memory
she is unaware of the fierce fate
of her visions
she fears not knowing how to name
what does not exist ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Turning the pages of crime novels it occurs to me to ask how it's possible to write so much without saying the word "pain," "life," or "anxiety." I reject this stupid dehumanization. The behaving without motive. The horrific shutting out of what is most vital or important. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

I mourn myself; this is my right. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

I stored up the purest words
for making new silences ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and played the role of Death. Because, how can Death possibly die? ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

The night is the color of the eyelids of the dead. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me. All night
you abandon
me slowly…All
night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night
some-
one checks for me and I check for someone. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

All night I flee from someone. I lead the chase, I lead the fugue. I sing a song of mourning. Black birds over black shrouds. My brain cries. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Mouth sewn shut. Eyelids sewn shut. I forgot myself. The wind inside. Everything shut, and the wind inside. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

He might be too old for it, but I think I can bully him into literacy. ~ Alejandra Diaz Mattoni

Regardless of what others may tell you, you only need two Mexican-Americans for a Mexican standoff. ~ Alejandra Diaz Mattoni

The hardest part was knowing that I would have to talk about the album when I released it. I think the hardest part was waiting to see how long it would take for me to be able to get through the questions people would ask me. ~ Alejandra Deheza

Experience tells me habits are stronger than love, fear, and necessity. ~ Alejandra Diaz Mattoni

The fire had burned to coals and he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.
What's her name? said Rawlins in the darkness.
Alejandra. Her name is Alejandra. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Not all monsters look monstrous.' There's so much sadness in his voice that I want to ask how he knows that. 'Sometimes they're perfectly normal humans. Sometimes they're so beautiful, you would never suspect. ~ Zoraida Cordova

I wanted to protect the songs. I wanted to make sure I could write freely and not be self-conscious about it. ~ Alejandra Deheza