"We pursue her in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Octavio Paz, Nobel Lecture, In Search of the Present, Nobelprize.org., 8 December 1990.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Metamorphosis
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Metamorphosis
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