Great Throughts Treasury

"What is that sad, black island like a pall? Why, Cytherea, famed in many a book, the Eldorado of old-stagers. Look: It's but a damned poor country after all!"

"What matter, if you make - fairy with velvet eyes."

"What matters an eternity of damnation to someone who has found in one second the infinity of joy?"

"What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes."

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters."

"When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!"

"When an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth."

"When I was a kid, I felt in my heart Ahsasin opposite: horror of life and ecstasy of life ..."

"When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies."

"When old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, and build me stately palaces by candlelight."

"Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases."

"Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself."

"Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true."

"Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!"

"Which one of us has not dreamed, on ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose: musical, without rhythm or rhyme; adaptable enough and discordant enough to conform to the lyrical movements of the soul, the waves of revery, the jolts of consciousness? Above all else, it is residence in the teeming cities, it is the crossroads of numberless relations that gives birth to this obsessional ideal."

"Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness."

"Who are the unfortunates who did not calm afternoon, and take, like owls, the arrival of the night by signal coven?"

"Who dares, in front of Love, to mention Hell? Curbed forever be that useless dreamer who first imagined, in his brutish mind, of sheer futility the fatuous schemer, honor with Love could ever be combined. He who in mystic union would enmesh shadow with warmth, and daytime with the night, will never warm his paralytic flesh at the red sun of amorous delight. Go, if you wish, and seek some boorish lover: offer your virgin heart to his crude hold, full of remorse and horror you'll recover, and bring me your scarred breast to be consoled... Down here, a soul can only serve one master."

"Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer."

"Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?"

"With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's steep height, and saw the city as from a tower, hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells, where evil comes up softly like a flower. Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain, not for vain tears I went up at that hour; but like an old sad faithful lecher, fain to drink delight of that enormous trull whose hellish beauty makes me young again. Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full, sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand in gold-laced veils of evening beautiful, I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and hunted have pleasures of their own to give, the vulgar herd can never understand."

"With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk."

"Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue."

"Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable."

"Women do not know how to separate the soul from the body."

"Women need whippings. Man can punish them by love. As their children. But at the same time provides for itself, the pain that will despise their loved ones."

"You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?"

"You gave me your mud and I have turned it to gold."

"You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk."

"You have to be sublime without interruption."

"You shall suffer forever the influence of my kiss. You shall be beautiful in my fashion. You shall love that which I love and that which loves me: water, clouds, silence and the night; the immense green sea; the formless and multiform streams; the place where you shall not be; the lover whom you shall not know; flowers of monstrous shape; perfumes that cause delirium; cats that shudder, swoon and curl up on pianos and groan like women, with a voice that is hoarse and gentle! And you shall be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You shall be the queen of all men that have green eyes, whose necks also I have clasped in my nocturnal caresses; of those who love the sea, the sea that is immense, tumultuous and green, the formless and multiform streams, the place where they are not, the woman whom they do not know, sinister flowers that resemble the censers of a strange religion, perfumes that confound the will; and the savage and voluptuous animals which are the emblems of their dementia."

"You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed."