Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.
Music is only love looking for words.
It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.
Art like life is an open secret.
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.
Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.
Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.
The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.
Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!
What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.
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