…then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors

Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman’s womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into...

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer...

The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and...

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife,...

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure...

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

It was this that frightened me–the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His...

There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final...

And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of...

The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is...

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present,...

We don’t see things how they are, we see things the way we are.

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,’ I said. ‘That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of...

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not...

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense...

I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less....

We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my...

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious...

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .

When I saw you, Sabina, I chose my body.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy,...

I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over...

In chaos, there is fertility.

What I cannot love, I overlook.

We are more severe judges of our own acts… We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden...