Antonio Porchia

(1886–1968)

Antonio Porchia was born in Italy and lived in Argentina from 1911 until his death. All his writings (aphorisms) are contained in one book: Voices (the following quotations are from W.S. Merwin's 1988 translation of this work).

According to Merwin, Porchia claimed that his aphorisms were not his own but "emanations which he has heard and set down."

Roberto Juarroz, another writer from Argentina and a close friend of Porchia's, wrote: "I do not remember another being who was so simple and so graceful…. When we were with him we heard each word deepen under his boundless attention. His way of listening seemed to create a depth in his companions. And when he spoke we had the feeling that he did so 'from the other side', which then became infinitely close, much closer than this side."

Truth has very few friends
and those few are suicides.

Treat me as you should treat me,
not as I should be treated.

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

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

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.

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

Before I traveled my road I was my road.

In no one did I find who I should be like.
And I stayed like that: like no one.

I come from dying, not from having been born.
From having been born I am going.

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings.
For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.

Nothing that is complete breathes.

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

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

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

I will help you to approach if you approach,
and to keep away if you keep away.

The mystery brings peace to my eyes, not blindness.

When your suffering is a little greater than my suffering
I feel that I am a little cruel.

He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?

Suffering does not follow us. It goes before us.

The tree is alone, the cloud is alone.
Everything is alone when I am alone.

A hundred years die in a moment,
just as a moment dies in a moment.

Suffering is above, not below.
And everyone thinks that suffering is below.
And everyone wants to rise.

My body separates me from every being
and from every thing.
Nothing but my body.

I saw a dead man. And I was little, little, little…
My God, what a great thing a dead man is!

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

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

In my silence only my voice is missing.

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

A child shows his toy, a man hides his.

Near me nothing but distances.

The loss of a thing affects us
until we have lost it altogether.

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

All that I know does not even help me to know it.

All that I have lost I find at every step
and remember that I have lost it.

My pieces of time play with eternity.

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

To wound the heart is to create it.

The fear of separation is all that unites.

When you seem to be listening to my words,
they seem to be your words, with me listening.

When I have nothing left, I will ask for no more.

Every toy has the right to break.

Sometimes I believe that evil is everything,
and that good is only a beautiful desire for evil.

A large heart can be filled with very little.

The love that is not all pain is not all love.

As long as we think we are worth something,
we wrong ourselves.

The harm that I have not done,
what harm it has done!

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

I would ask something more of this world
if it had something more.

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

My neighbor's poverty makes me feel poor;
my own does not.

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

I can wait for you no longer.
Because you have arrived.

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

You wound and you will wound again.
Because you wound and then you go away.
You do not stay with the wound.

Flowers are without hope.
Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.