You haven’t loved yet,” he said. “You’ve only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you...

I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through,...

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness… something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame,...

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest...

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a...

No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.When...

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are...

I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If...

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness,...

Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys...

And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ

The light was crude. It made Artaud’s eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over...

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.

I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.

I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent,...

Our age has need of violence,” he writes. And he is violence.

He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was...

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it...

We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.

I’m in love with New York. It matches my mood. I’m not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the...

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy,...

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not...

Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.

A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and...

There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.

She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others’ eyes. She does not dare to be herself.

…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...