"A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine"

"Moi qui sais des lais pour les reines Les complaintes de mes années Des hymnes d'esclave aux murènes La romance du mal-aimé Et des chansons pour les sirènes"

"Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne La joie venait toujours après la peine Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure"

"Voici que vient l'été la saison violente Et ma jeunesse est morte ainsi que le printemps Ô soleil c'est le temps de la raison ardente"

"De cette alliance nouvelle, car jusqu'ici les décors et les costumes, d'une part, la choréographie, d'autre part, n'avaient entre eux qu'un lien factice, il est résulté, dans Parade, une sorte de sur-réalisme."

"La géométrie est aux arts plastiques ce que la grammaire est à l'art de l'écrivain."

"Ô bouches l'homme est a la recherche d'un nouveau langage Auquel le grammairien d'aucune langue n'aura rien à dire"

"The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking.I am trying to renew poetic style,but within a classical framework.On the other hand,I don't want to lapse into imitating others.Letter to Picasso 1918"

"Théâtre des ris et des pleurs Lit! où je nais, et où je meurs, Tu nous fais voir comment voisins Sont nos plaisirs et chagrins."

"Verlaine, the maudit poet, but with a strong religious torment that ended up prevailing, speaking of the love for Mary: «all other loves are orders». With similar words, he wanted to underline that "free" character of Marian devotion that the Church has always safeguarded. Over 20 centuries, only a few dogmas have been proclaimed about her di lei: which among other things, we know, are at the service and shelter of her di lei Son di lei, well before her di lei. Only to these defined truths does the Catholic owe homage. Everything else, regarding Mary, is left to the free sensitivity and initiative of the believer."

"Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia."

"Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure Éparse au vent crispé du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym… Et tout le reste est littérature."

"Anna Margolin was greatly influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; among the Germans, by Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke; and among the Yiddish poets, by Itsik Manger and Avrom Sutzkever."

"That time, that excitement, I will always remember,/like a song without words, like a poem by Verlaine."

"Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!"

"Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou! Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie, Du rendre un peu la Rime assagie. Si l'on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où? Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime! Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime?"

"Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon cœur D'une langueur Monotone."

"Et je m'en vais Au vent mauvais Qui m'emporte Deçà, delà, Pareil à la Feuille morte."

"La lune blanche Luit dans les bois; De chaque branche Part une voix Sous la ramée."

"Il pleure dans mon cœur Comme il pleut sur la ville. Quelle est cette langueur Qui pénètre mon cœur?"

"C'est bien la pire peine De ne savoir pourquoi Sans amour et sans haine Mon cœur a tant de peine!"

"Qu'as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà Pleurant sans cesse, Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà De ta jeunesse?"

"De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l'Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose. Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise: Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint."

"To arms! to arms! ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe! March on! march on! all hearts resolved On victory or death!"

"Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé! Contre nous de la tyrannie, L'étendard sanglant est levé, (bis) Entendez-vous dans les campagnes Mugir ces féroces soldats? Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes! Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons!"

"Writing is not speaking. It's silencing yourself. It's screaming without noise."

"There is no vacation from love, it doesn't exist. Love, you must live it fully, with its boredom and all, there is no possible vacation from that."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"Ce qui remplit le temps c'est vraiment de le perdre."

"Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it."

"Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny."

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."

"It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him."

"Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it."

"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."

"The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics."

"Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being."

"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid."

"Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones."

"However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practise to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself."

"All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth."

"With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows."

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

"It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present."

"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life."

"There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity."

"So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair."

"Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape."

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."

"But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes."