Great Throughts Treasury

"Be grateful to the man who cares nothing for your remorse. You are his equal."

"That which comes into the world to disturb nothing deserves neither respect nor patience."

"A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. Traces alone engender dreams."

"Children and geniuses know that there is no bridge, only the water that lets itself be crossed."

"Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones."

"How can we live without the unknown before us?"

"I believe in the magic and authority of words."

"Impose your chance, and will hold your happiness to your risk. To watch you, they will get used."

"In action, be primitive; in foresight, a strategist."

"In my land we don't question someone who has been touched deeply."

"It is not whether your words or actions are tough or gentle; it is the spirit behind your actions and words that announces your inner state."

"Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun."

"No man, unless he be dead in living, can feel at anchor in this life."

"There is no malign shadow over capsized boats."

"Whoever comes into the world to disturb nothing deserves neither respect nor patience."

"A few beings are neither in society nor in a state of dreaming. They belong to an isolated fate, to an unknown hope. Their open acts seem anterior to time?s first inculpation and to the skies? unconcern. It occurs to no one to employ them. The future melts before their gaze. They are the noblest and the most disquieting"

"A poem is the realization of love."

"Desire, desire which knows, we draw no advantage from our shadows except from some veritable sovereignties accompanied by invisible flames, invisible chains, which, coming to light, step after step, cause us to shine."

"Despite the open window in the room of long absence, the odor of the rose is still linked with the breath that was there. Once again we are without previous experience, newcomers, in love. The rose! The field of its ways would dispel even the effrontery of death. No grating stands in the way. Desire is alive, an ache in our vaporous foreheads. One who walks the earth in its rains has nothing to fear from the thorn in places either finished or unfriendly. But if he stops to commune with himself, woe! Pierced to the quick, he suddenly flies to ashes, an archer reclaimed by beauty."

"Discipline as you bleed!"

"Eternity is not much longer than life."

"He who comes into the world to disturb nothing deserves neither respect nor patience,"

"How did writing come to me? Like bird?s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended."

"I was born like the rock, with my wounds? From birth I have had an aggressive breathing."

"Imagination consists in expelling from reality many incomplete persons, making use of the magical and subversive powers of desire, to obtain their return in the form of a completely satisfying presence. This, then, is the inextinguishable, uncreated reality."

"Man is able to do what he is unable to imagine. His head trails a wake through the galaxy of the absurd."

"Man without shortcomings, is a mountain without gorges."

"Midnight is not in everyman's reach."

"One after the other, they wished to predict a happy future for us, with an eclipse in their image and all the anguish befitting us! We disdained this equality, answered no to their assiduous words. We followed the stony way the heart traced for us up to the plains of the air and the unique silence. We made our demanding love bleed, our happiness wrestle each pebble. They say at this moment that, beyond their vision, the hail terrifies them, more than the snow of the dead!"

"The bottom line is threatened constantly by the trivial."

"The poem is furious ascension; poetry, the game of arid riverbanks. I am a man of riverbanks ? excavation and inflammation ? not always able to be torrent."

"The poet advises: 'Read me. Read me again. He does not always come away unscathed from his page, but like the poor, he knows how to make use of an olive's eternity."

"There is only the one like me, the companion man or woman, who can wake me from my torpor, set off the poetry, hurl me against the limits of the old desert for me to triumph over it. No other. Neither sky nor privileged earth, now things which set you to trembling. Torch, I only waltz with that one."

"This country is but a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulcher. In my country, tender proofs of spring and badly dressed birds are preferred to far-off goals. Truth waits for dawn beside a candle. Window glass is neglected. To the watchful, what does it matter? In my country, we don't question a man deeply moved. There is no malignant shadow on the capsized boat. A cool hello is unknown in my country. We borrow only what can be returned increased. There are leaves, many leaves, on the trees in my country. The branches are free to bear no fruits. We don't believe in the good faith of the victor. In my country, we say thank you."

"Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again."

"With my teeth I have seized life upon the knife of my youth. With my lips today, with my lips alone."

"With those we love, we stopped talking, and it's not silent."

"You have been my love for so many years, my giddiness before so much waiting, which nothing can age or cool; even that which awaited our death, or slowly learned how to fight us, even that which is strange to us, both my eclipses and my returns. Closed like a box-wood shutter, an extreme and compact chance is our chain, our mountain-range, our compressing splendor and glow. I say chance, o my hammered one; either of us can receive the mysterious part of the other while keeping its secret unshed; and the pain that comes from elsewhere finds its separation at last in the flesh of our unity, finds its solar orbit at last at the center of our own cloud which it rends and starts once more. As I feel it, I say chance. You have raised up the mountain-peak which my waiting will have to clear when tomorrow disappears."