30 phrases by João Cabral de Melo Neto for those who love national literature

Even unintentionally speaks in verse, who speaks from emotion.

Love ate even the days not yet announced in the sheets… It ate my silence, my headache, my fear of death.

I take refuge on this pristine beach where there is nothing on which the night can rest.

Without making a present there can be no future.

There is no umbrella against the poem.

A rooster alone does not weave a morning: he will always need other roosters.

Writing is being at the extreme of yourself.

You are the anticipation of the last movie I will ever see.

Around man’s life there are certain glass boxes, inside which, as in a cage, an animal can be heard throbbing.

Since I’m withdrawing, only death I see active, only death I come across and sometimes even festive.

If we are Severinos equal in everything in life, we die the same death, the same severe death.

Carlos, there’s a machine that never writes letters. There’s a bottle of ink that never drank alcohol.

Life is not resolved with words.

The river sometimes resembled the gentle tongue of a dog, sometimes the sad belly of a dog.

What lives does not dull.

I still feel the sea from the dream that flooded my room.

Education through stone… There you don’t learn the stone: there the stone, a birthstone, ingrains the soul.

Picking beans is limited to writing: the beans are thrown into the water in the bowl and the words on the sheet of paper.

Doing anything is useless. Doing nothing is useless. But between doing and not doing it is worth the useless doing.

That river never opens to fish, to the brightness, to the knife-like restlessness that fish have.

That grave you are in, with measured palms, is the smallest quota you took in life.

Who will tell me that this ocean is not common to us?

Disorder in the soul that tramples under this flesh that transpires… It seeks the order of that silence that still speaks.

Love returned to eat the papers where I had thoughtlessly written my name again.

Is there any sign that makes us understand that we were, together, fish of the same sea?

I speak only with what I speak: with the same twenty words revolving around the sun.

This white sheet banishes my dream, incites me to a clear and precise verse.

I leave my poem as if washing my hands.

Your best garment will be of earth and not of cloth: it is not torn or mended.

A river always expects a wider and wider sea.