The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.

I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him – which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la...

Le coeur humain, beau comme un sismographe.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if...

We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man’s passing.

It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.

authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

The lamentable expression: ‘But it was only a dream”, the increasing use of which – among others in the domain of the cinema – has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for...

We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. ‘Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still...

My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of...

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

I am the soul in limbo.

May night continue to fall upon the orchestra

Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world...

They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today’s blind architecture – a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

Time is a tease

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning – that event which I may not...

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.””Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.