Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of...

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything...

Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient...

How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to...

She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling...

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you....

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented....

At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently:...

She was sewing together the little proofs of his devotion out of which to make a garment for her tattered love and faith. He cut into the faith with negligent scissors, and she mended and...

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

Henry’s recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while...

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such...

Even a room, arranged in a certain manner, prevents certain things from taking place in it.

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which...

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic —...

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Die Vergangenheit war wie jene altmodischen, mit Kräutern und Blumen gefüllten Duftkissen, deren Aroma die Kleider durchdringt und an ihnen haften bleibt.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not...

I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than...

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are...

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted...

Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you… I love when you say...

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.

Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one…

life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist’s task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal...

This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

¡Los ángeles del sexo! Son maravillosos precisamente por lo mucho que sorprenden, por lo mucho que cambian. Tú por ejemplo, con tu aspecto de que nunca te han tocado, puedo imaginarte mordiendo y arañando. Estoy...

How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?… I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he...

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.

What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favour of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the facts.[…] in self-defense, I accuse the writers of fairy-tales. Not hunger, not cruelty,...

She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?