All Quotes

"There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. (4)"

"The female contains all qualities and tempers them, She is in her place and moves with perfect balance, She is all things duly veil'd, she is both passive and active, She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters. (5)"

"The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place, He too is all qualities, he is action and power, The flush of the known universe is in him…(6)"

"The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred, No matter who it is, it is sacred… (6)"

"Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna. Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions."

"Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark."

"Solitude may rust your words."

"The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them."

"Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth."

"So much one man can do, That does both act and know."

"I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels."

"Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment."

"Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage."

"The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned."

"Electric flesh-arrows traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm."

"The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

"I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind."

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."

"The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest."

"For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds..."

"My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living."

"Passion gives me moments of wholeness."

"We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."

"Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her."

"Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments."

"Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way."

"Love reduces the complexity of living."

"The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others."

"To lie, of course, is to engender insanity."

"I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes."

"There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience..."

"You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."

"The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment."

"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 — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."

"I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art ."

"When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with."

"For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

"He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?"

"You cannot save people, you can only love them."

"I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day."

"Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much.""

"The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold."

"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."

"He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous.""

"I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama."

"Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst."

"No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness ."