Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul
Art like life is an open secret.
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.
Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.
The memory of man is as old as misfortune
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
Truth disappears with the telling of it.
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.
Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.
I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?
after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.
No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.
I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.
But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds
Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.
Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.
Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.
The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.
Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Truth is what most contradicts itself.
Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.
It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.
Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.
Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
It is not peace we seek but meaning.
Music is only love looking for words.
They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.
To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.
It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."
He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.
The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.
Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there.
Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine
A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.
Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.
