A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading.
A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss.
He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air.
The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.
Without you I wouldn’t have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.
I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.
I love you, I’m waiting for you unbearably.
One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.
If his Russian was music, his English was murder.
I was always lonely and I am lonely still.
Sometimes, though, angels smoke-in their sleeves. But when the archangel goes by, they throw their cigarettes away: This is what falling stars are.
I’m walking out now into the soft light, the cooling him of evening, and I will love you tonight, and tomorrow, and still many more, so very many tomorrows.
The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence – and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free.
Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again – never.
Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp.
With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.
And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, A school of Freudians headed for the tomb.