“The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.”

From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands and establishes roots that are watered by weeping.

My soul is an empty carousel at sunset.

I do not love you-except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, from waiting to not waiting for you my heart moves from the cold into the fire.

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

I like on the table, when we’re speaking, the light of a bottle of intelligent wine.

Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?

Love is a war of lightning, and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness.

In the distance someone is singing.

Tie your heart at night to mine, love, and both will defeat the darkness like twin drums beating in the forest against the heavy wall of wet leaves.

What did the earth teach the trees? How to speak to the sky.

I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every window.

Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss.

As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

I love you as one loves certain dark things.

I move in the university of the waves.

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

If you lose an opportunity you will be like one who lets the bird fly away; you will never get it back.

Never look for birds of this year in the nests of the last.

You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

You can cage the songbird, but you can’t make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you’ll have to clip her wings.

Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.