30 phrases by Manoel de Barros that celebrate this poet of the soul

The straight is a curve that does not dream.

Now I don’t want to know anything else, I just want to improve what I don’t know.

I’m a minor builder. The twigs with which I arrange the struts of my nest are firmer than the walls of the world’s great buildings. oh oh!

Everything I don’t invent is false.

Poetry does not exist to communicate, but to communicate.

Some people are born poetry.

A sea end colors the horizons.

I want the word that serves in the mouths of the birds.

The leaves of the trees serve to teach us to fall without fanfare.

I saw nature as someone who wears it. I closed myself with foam.

For my imagination has no road. And I really don’t like the road. I like detour and unsee.

I want the delight of being able to feel the simplest things.

I saw the morning resting on top of a rock! Doesn’t that change the face of nature?

I am very selfish and narcissistic. My world is me in flesh and letters. I am what I produce and what I cannot produce. I suffer a little in this part of not being able to produce.

I’m very full of voids. My dying organ dominates me. I’m out of eternities.

Whoever walks on the rail is an iron train, I am water that runs between stones: freedom hunts for a way.

That the importance of a thing is not measured with a tape measure or with scales or barometers, etc. That the importance of a thing must be measured by the enchantment that the thing produces in us.

Poetry is stored in words—that’s all I know. My fate is that I don’t know almost everything. Over nothing I have depths. I have no connections with reality.

My independence has handcuffs.

Man’s greatest wealth is his incompleteness. At this point I am wealthy.

He spent his days there, quiet, among the small things. And I loved it.

The word love is empty. There are no people inside it.

At the end of the afternoon, our mother appeared at the back of the yard: my children, the day has grown old, go inside.

We are incomplete, we feel incomplete. We can only be completed by the mystery.

When my eyes are dirty with civilization, a desire for trees and birds grows inside them.

The mother noticed that the boy liked the empty more than the full. She said that the voids are bigger and even infinite.

I only use the word to compose my silences.

Poetry is flying off the wing.

I’m too lazy to be serious.

Inertia is my main act. I don’t even get out of myself to fish.