“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.”

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

You feel on your lips a kiss Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life.

As for me, I am intact; and I don’t care.

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses.

I could never throw Love out of the window.

True life is elsewhere.

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?

Eternity is the sun mixed with the sea.

A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn’t he?

It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense, That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.