To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?
I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.
Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!
True life is elsewhere.
Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.
I’m intact, and I don’t give a damn.
A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn’t he?
The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.
Morality is the weakness of the mind.
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper – both of us – in ecstasy!
What an old maid I’m getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
But the problem is to make the soul into a monster.
Faith assuages, guides, restores.
You feel on your lips a kiss Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life...