She called herself Europa, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself Europa, and her god was Beauty.

English:Ô, take this eager dance you fool, don’t brandish your stick at me. I have several reasons to travel on, on to the endless sea: I have lost my love. I’ve drunk my purse. My...

I likened her to the slender PSYCHÉ and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: The dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened...

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my youth was ending in an explosion of unreal passion. Memories like these make my life sacred and holy.

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence...

I’m not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun… let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus… Aphrodite...

Wanderess, Wanderess, weave us a story of seduction and ruse. Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.’…I jot this phrase of invocation in my old leather-bound notebook on a bright, cold morning at...

She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because...

The comedy in our lives was those first few weeks we lived together in Paris: Our bodies desired one another, our souls opened for one another. We experienced all of the happiness and anguish of...

It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly...

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine,...

88.People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like...

I regained my soul through literature after those times I’d lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents...

From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent. It can only be squandered.

The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.