“...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.”

“There isBy my leaning over the precipiceOf your presence and your absence in hopeless fusionMy finding the secretOf loving youAlways for the first time”

“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.”

“This cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things ‘are,’ while others, which well might be, ‘are not.”

“The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning-that event which i may not yet have found but on whose path I seek myself- is not earned by work.”

“There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.”