The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.
A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.
This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.
Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.
I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.
Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.
We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.
Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
Solitude may rust your words.
Memory is a great betrayer.
Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.
We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.
The dream has to be translated into reality.
To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.