Antonio Porchia

Antonio Porchia (13 November 1886 – 9 November 1968) was an Italian-born writer and poet.

Voces (1943)

Translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin:

• The trees are alone, the clouds are alone. Everything is alone when I am alone.

• Yes, this is what is good: to forgive evil. There is no other good.

• Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?

• When I look for my existence, I do not look for it in myself.

• We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself.

• We become aware of the void as we fill it.

• Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.

• Almost always is it a the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.

• Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.

• You are fastened to them and cannot understand how, because they are not fastened to you.

• When I am asleep, I dream what I dream when I am awake. Its a continuous dream.

• To wound the heart is to create it.

• He who remains with himself for a long time, degrades.

• You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own.

• Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist.

• He who makes a paradise of his bread makes a hell of his hunger.

• Creo que son los males del alma, el alma. Porque el alma que se cura de sus males, muere.
  
  • I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.

• I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.

• If only I could leave everything as it is, without moving a single star or a single cloud. Oh, if only I could!

• You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun.

• And if you find everything as soon as you look for it, you find it in vain, you look for it in vain.

• Those who gave away their wings are sad not to see them fly.

• You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

• Sometimes what I want and what I don’t want make so many concessions to each other that they end up looking alike.

• Nothing is not only nothing. It is also our prison.

• My great day came and went, I do not know how. Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went.

• Quien no llena su mundo de fantasmas, se queda solo.
  
  • He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.

• I would go to heaven, but I would take my hell; I would not go alone.

• They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.

• He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.

• Tú crees que me matas. Yo creo que te suicidas.
  
  • You think you are killing me. I think you are committing suicide.

• My heaviness comes from the heights.

• Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.

• I stop wanting what I am looking for, looking for it.

• When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.

• Because they know the name of what I am looking for, they think they know what I am looking for!

• A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.

• When I break any of the chains that bind me I feel that I make myself smaller.

• Before I traveled my road I was my road.

• One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

• Sometimes, at night, I turn on the light to not see my own darkness.

• I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received.

• Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides

• In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.

• They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

• If you do not raise your eyes, you will think you are the highest point.

• What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.

• Flowers are without hope, because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.

• I keep my hands empty for the sake of what I have had in them.

• Certainties are arrived at only on foot.

• If you are good to this one and that one, this one and that one will say you are good. If you are good to everyone, no one will say that you are good.

• He who goes step by step always finds himself level with a step.

• I have been my own disciple and my own master. And I have been a good disciple but a bad master.

• The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken.

• A lonely man is too much for a lonely man.

• The tragedy of a man is greater when he gives it up.

• He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with.

• Infancy is what is eternal, everything else is brevity, extreme brevity.

• My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.

• What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.

• The children whom nobody leads by the hand are the children who know they are children.

• God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man.

• Everything is like the rivers: the work of the slopes.

• The deep, seen with depth, is surface.

• The doing doesn't do anything.

• What I did or didn't do, I think it's over now. And what I will or will not do, I think is also over.

• If I think about what life is, I believe life is a miracle. And if I think about what a miracle is, I don’t believe in it.

• You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which are perhaps your hands.

• I have found the most beautiful side of the flowers in the fallen flowers.

• Love, when it fits inside a flower, is infinite.

• The deep in me is everything. But it is everything without me. Because everything that is deep, is only everything.

• Like I made myself, I wouldn’t make me again. Maybe, I would make me again in the way I disintegrate.

• Every toy has the right the break down.

• If I were told that I have died or that I haven't been born, I wouldn't stop thinking about it.

• You are always telling a dream. When do you dream it?

• And if nothing is repeated in the same way, all things are last things.

• To be in company is not to be with someone, but to be in someone. ~ Porchia

• My God, I have almost never believed in you, and yet I have always loved you.

• I talk thinking that I shouldn't talk: that is how I talk.

• You do not have anything and still you would give me a world. I owe you a world.

• You will find the distance that separates you from them by joining them.

• Sometimes I find that misery is so vast that I am afraid of needling it.

• A new pain enters and the old pains of the household receive it with their silence, not with their death.

• I have come one step away from everything and here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

• Suffering does not follow us. It goes before us.

• Not everyone does evil, but everyone stands accused.

• We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all.

• If you are not going to change your route, why change your guide?

• No one understands that you have given everything. You must give more.

• The confession of one man humbles all.

• Your pain is so great that probably it does not hurt you.

• Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.

• When you made me into another, I left you with me.

• The shadows: some hide, others reveal.

• When one does not love the impossible, one does not love anything.

• Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light.

• The fear of separation is all that unites.

• Every time I wake, I understand how easy it is to be nothing.

• My father, when he went, made my childhood a gift of half century.

• A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.

• It is when I assent to nothing that I assent to all.

• Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing.

• When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.

• A hundred men together are the hundredth part of man.

• The far away, the very far, the farthest, I have found only in my own blood.

• Only the wound speaks its own word.

• And if the clouds think they fly with their wings, they fly with their wings, but they cannot control them.

• Words that they said to me at other times, I hear now.

• I can wait for you longer. Because you have arrived.

• The dream which is not fed with dream disappears.

• In its last moment, the whole of my life will last only a moment.

• Man lives measuring and he is measured by nothing. Not even by himself.

• A child shows his toy, a man hides his.

• I began my comedy as its only actor, and I come to the end of it as its only spectator.

• Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant.

• I love for the sake of what I have loved, and what I have loved, I would not go back to loving.

• The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.

• Chimeras come singly and leave accompanied.

• Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.

• More grievous than tears is the sight of them.

• When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.

• Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.

• Human suffering, while it is asleep, is shapeless. If it is wakened it takes the form of the waker.

• I found the whole of my first world in my meager bread.

• Night is a world lit by itself.

• Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.

• Everything that I bear within me bound, is to be found somewhere else free.

• Not believing has a sickness which is believing a little.

• Man goes nowhere, everything comes to man like tomorrow.

• If those who owe us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we would be.

• A little candor never leaves me. It is what protects me.

• That in a man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.

• When I do not walk in the clouds I walk as though I were lost.

• Beyond my body my veins are invisible.

• He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none both feel the same desire: to make something.

• Nothing that is complete breathes.

External links

• Antonio Porchia's Voces Website
• "The Extraordinary Story of Antonio Porchia" An essay of Prof. Vincenzo Villella