30 sentences by Ferreira Gullar to remember the immensity of this poet

A part of me is everybody; another part is nobody: bottomless background.

I say goodbye to illusion, but not to the world.

If you can’t take me by the hand, Snow White Girl, take me in your heart.

My people and my poem grow together as the young tree grows in fruit.

As two and two make four, I know that life is worth living even though bread is expensive and freedom is small.

Life only consumes what feeds it.

Because nothing that has been done satisfies life, nothing fills life. Life is living.

What has passed has passed. You will never relight the fire of the time you extinguished.

The poem only fits the man without a stomach, the woman with clouds, the priceless fruit.

The poem, gentlemen, does not stink or smell.

In the world there are many traps and many mouths telling you that life is short, that life is crazy.

I am dispersed in things, in people, in drawers: suddenly I find parts of myself there: laughter, vertebrae. I’m undone in the clouds.

I am like you, made of things remembered and forgotten, faces and hands.

Where do I begin, where do I end, if what is outside is inside as in a circle whose periphery is the center?

I got lost in time. Where will my pieces be? Much has gone with friends who no longer hear or speak.

Art exists because life is not enough.

I love life that is full of children, flowers and women, life, this right to be in the world, to have two feet and hands, one face and the hunger for everything, hope.

Poetry laughs. A ordinance is lowered: it is forbidden to mix the poem with Ipanema. The poet testifies at the inquest: My poem is pure, stemless flower, I swear! It has no past or future. It doesn’t taste like gall or honey: It’s made of paper.

I want to be a woman, I see myself as a girl.

Because nothing that has been done satisfies life, nothing fills life. Life is living!

Faced with the unpredictability of life, we invent God, who protects us from the stray bullet.

I don’t care about suffering, I want happiness.

May art point us to an answer, even if it doesn’t know.

But that’s the nature of love, comparable to the wind: fluid and sweeping.

The poet becomes mute without real words.

A part of me is just vertigo: another part, language.

We are all brothers, not because we share the same roof and the same table: we see the same sword over our heads.

A part of me weighs, ponders: another part, delirious…

At night, as the light is low, we have the impression that time does not pass or at least it does not flow.

Here I have myself as I neither know myself nor want myself, without beginning or end. Here I have myself without me, I don’t remember anything, I don’t even know.