"You know that a melodic tune and a soft song made me cry,
and that a word of affection made me slave of another soul, and you know, also,
that all I’ve dreamt of had a heart-rending reality."

"Where I tread, I trample corpses,
In my brain, poison thoughts do flow,
With fierce grim eyes, I hurl torches,
Now kneel, worm—pray! Or melt in my mad glow!"

"A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

"Not a star will remain in the night.
The night itself will not remain.
I will die and with me the sum
Of the intolerable universe.
I’ll erase the pyramids, the coins,
The continents and all the faces.
I’ll erase the accumulated past.
I’ll make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I gaze at the last sunset.
I am listening to the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no-one."

"I feel my days flying before the pursuit of death. All that remains to me of weeks, or months, or years, in which I may drink in the light of the sun, seems to me no more than a single night, a summer night, which scarcely counts, because it will so soon be at an end.

Death! Silence! Eternity! What mysteries, what names of terror to the being who longs for happiness, immortality, perfection! Where shall I be to-morrow—in a little while—when the breath of life has forsaken me? Where will those be whom I love? Whither are we all going? The eternal problems rise before us in their implacable solemnity. Mystery on all sides! And faith the only star in this darkness and uncertainty!"

"

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads…

"

"

O your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do before Death’s knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?

As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:

This is the way the night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

"

"I am trying to figure out two very simple things. How to live, and how to die. Period. That’s all I’m trying to do, all day long."

"There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him—sickness, poverty, loss—and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wind in an aspen-tree, and all is well."