Newspapers often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.
In those quiet places where my heart once spoke to yours... I breathed eternal summer.
We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.
Naturally, a writer has some joys he lives for and that do satisfy him fully. But for me, these come at the moment of conception, at the instant when the subject reveals itself, when the articulation of the work sketches itself out before the suddenly heightened awareness, at those delicious moments when imagination and intelligence are fused. These moments disappear as they are born. What is left is the execution, that is to say, a long period of hard work.
Even if the mind were not, its laws would be!
I’ve learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions, and destinies tend to repeat each other.
You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.
The only reality is “anxiety” in the whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated.
On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence – through a curious transposition peculiar to our times – it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself. The.
Every excess decreases vitality and thus suffering.
Good night. What? Those ladies behind those windows? Dream, monsieur, cheap dream, a trip to the Indies! Those persons perfume themselves with spices. You go in, they draw the curtains, and the navigation begins. The gods come down onto the naked bodies and the islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it.
I never truly believed that human business was some serious thing.
If it happened that one of them was carried off by the disease, it was almost always without his having had time to realize it. Snatched suddenly from his long, silent communion with a wraith of memory, he was plunged straightway into the densest silence of all. He’d had no time for anything.
He was overcome by a violent and fraternal love for this man from whom he had felt so distant, and he realized that by killing him he had consummated a union which bound them together forever.
Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, “the bow bent to the breaking-point.
A writer has some hope even if he is not appreciated. He assumes that his works will bear witness to what he was.
It is easier to cut off heads than to have ideas.
Even the small satisfaction of writing letters was denied us. It came to this: not only had the town ceased to be in touch with the rest of the world by normal means of communication, but also – according to a second notification – all correspondence was forbidden, to obviate the risk of letters’ carrying infection outside the town.
Style, like poplin, all too often conceals eczema.
Either this stripped-down solitude or the storm of love–nothing else in the world interests me.