The tragedy of Dionysus: Wear a black robe at night, and white you’ll wear by morning; but wear a purple robe to the midnight feast, and when you wake you’ll dress in black to mourn...

She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city

In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.

I cursed myself. For once, heaven had sent me “Beauty” in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide...

May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.

I took her to bed with silk and song’Lay still, my love, I won’t be long,I must prepare my body for passion.”O, your body you give, but all else you ration…

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique...

Just as a painter paints,and a ponderer ponders,a writer writes,and a wanderer wanders.

You are like a god, like an immortal one,’ she whispered to me one night in our bed, her naked body pressed to mine, our sweat golden and glistening in the candlelight. ‘Oh, my love,’...

[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.

A ‘dreamer’ is one possesses the gift of dreaming by day. Sure, many dream at night, but don’t also small babies and animals dream at night? To dream by day and dream aloud: Is this...

May a man live well-, and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.

What a face this girl possessed!—Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face...

Wine gives one ‘ideas,’ whereas champagne gives one ‘strategies.

The artist’s greatest creation beganthe night he washed his memory of his failuresrubbed opium on his lipsdrank the wine that women offered himand lay down and wept.

The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, ‘I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing...

Why do we mortals wonder if it is through ‘human chaos’ or through ‘divine perfection’ when the world guides us to some magical event? In either case, is not the result the same? Is the...

Did I live the spring I’d sought?It’s true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day...

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for...

In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for...

Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.

As I look back on my life, I think of how few rules should be followed. As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two...

There was no world, no land, no god or heaven or earth outside of their two bodies naked and trembling in the act of love.

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. ‘Nothing in excess,’ professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and...

She was so delicate that, while we sat beneath the linden branches, a leaf would fall and drift down and touch her skin, and it would leave a bruise. So as we sat in the...

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.

Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.

The word “travel” comes from the Old French word “travail” (or “travailler”), which means “to work, to labor; a suffering or painful effort, an arduous journey, a tormenting experience.” (“Travel,” thus, is “a painful and...

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every...

As for you girls, you must risk everything for Freedom, and give everything for Passion, loving everything that your hearts and your bodies love. The only thing higher for a girl and more sacred for...

Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.

The poet believed that ‘Beauty’ first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The...

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)

We were hooked when we woke.We had arms for each other.But I yearned to resumeMy dreams of another.

She called herself an angel, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She lived every kind of life and dreamt every kind of dream. She was wild in her wandering, a drop of free...

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.

Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the...

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. ‘Time’ for her isn’t something to fight against....

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers....

Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare’s...

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Opium: that terrible truth serum. Dark secrets guarded for a lifetime can be divulged with carefree folly after a sip of the black smoke.

I once had a lovewho folded secrets between her thighs like napkins and concealed memories in the valley of her breasts.There was no match for the freckles on her chest, and no one could mistake...

The season was waning fastOur nights were growing cold at lastI took her to bed with silk and song,’Lay still, my love, I won’t be long;I must prepare my body for passion.”O, your body you...

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.