“All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.” andre breton”

“I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.”

“Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.”

“Even that great poverty which had been and remains mine let up for a few days. I was not, as it happens, opposed to this poverty: I accepted to pay the price for not being a slave to life, to settle for the right I had assumed once and for all to not express any ideas but my own. We were not many in doing this… Poverty passed by in the distance, made lovelier and almost justified, a little like what has been called, in the case of a painter who was one of your first friends, the blue period. It seemed the almost inevitable consequence of my refusal to behave the way almost all the others did, whether on one side or another. This poverty, whether you had the time to dread it or not, imagine it was only the other side of the miraculous coin of your existence: the Night of the Sunflower would have been less radiant without it. ”

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”

“I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.”

“The sexual eagle exults he will gild the earth once morehis descending winghis ascending wing sways imperceptibly the sleeves of the peppermintand all the water's adorable undressDays are counted so clearlythat the mirror has yielded to a froth of frondsof the sky i see but one starnow around us there is only the milk describing its dizzy ellipsisfrom which sometimes soft intuition with pupils of eyed agaterises to poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric lightthen great reaches cast anchor stretch out in the depths of my closed eyesicebergs radiating the customs of all the worlds yet to comebron from a fragment of you fragment unkown and iced on the wingyour existence the giant bouquet escaping fr4om my armsis badly tied it didgs out walls unrolls the stairs of housesloses its leaves in the show windows of the streetto gether the news i am always leaving to gather the newsthe newspaper is glass today and if letters no longer arriveit's that the train has been consumedthe great incision of the emerald which gaave birth to the foliageis scarred for always the sawdust of blinding snowand the quarries of flesh are sounding along on the first shelfreversed on this shelfi take the impression of death and lifeto the liquid air”