“LifeThe machineThe human soulA 75mm breechMy portrait”

“As a special branch of general philosophy, pathogenesis had never been explored. In my opinion it had never been approached in a strictly scientific fashion--that is to say, objectively, amorally, intellectually.All those who have written on the subject are filled with prejudice. Before searching out and examining the mechanism of causes of disease, they treat of 'disease as such', condemn it as an exceptional and harmful condition, and start out by detailing the thousand and one ways of combating it, disturbing it, destroying it; they define health, for this purpose, as a 'normal' condition that is absolute and immutable.Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope.What convention calls health is, after all, no more than this or that passing aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction, a special case already experienced, recognized, defined, finite, extracted and generalized for everybody's use. Just as a word only finds its way into the Dictionary Of The French Academy when it is well worn stripped of the freshness of its popular origin or of the elegance of its poetic value, often more than fifty years after its creation (the last edition of the learned Dictionary is dated 1878), just as the definition given preserves a word, embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is noble, hypocritical and arbitrary--a pose it never assumed in the days of its vogue, while it was still topical, living and meaningful--so it is that health, recognized as a public Good, is only the sad mimic of some illness which has grown unfashionable, ridiculous and static, a solemnly doddering phenomenon which manages somehow to stand on its feet between the helping hands of its admirers, smiling at them with its false teeth. A commonplace, a physiological cliche, it is a dead thing. And it may be that health is death itself.Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet.”

“Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.”

“My poor lifeThis shawlFrayed on strongboxes full of goldI roll along withDreamAnd smokeAnd the only flame in the universe”

“Kako je čitanje nešto neobično!Kako je čudno to čitanje koje poništava vreme, pretače vrtoglavi prostor, a da pri tom ne zaustavlja dah niti oduzima život čitaocu.Verujemo da smo nevidljivi, odsutni, iako smo svuda prisutni, čak i tamo gde smo, grozničavi, s tom knjigom u ruci koju gutamo, jedemo očima, kao u nekoj radnji bele magije, da bismo nahranili svoj duh.A čitanje je zbilja čarobna radnja svesti koja otkriva jednu od najnepoznatijih sposobnosti čovekovih i daje mu veliku moć: sposobnost da bude na dva mesta istovremeno i moć da se usami, da se potpuno odvoji od okoline, da izađe iz svog vlastitog života a da ne izgubi vezu sa životom; ukratko, da saobraća sa svim i svačim, čak i kada više ne veruje ni u šta.”

“Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'Worries Forget your worries All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way The telegraph wires they hang from The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle themThe world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic handIn the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger FleeAnd in the holes,The whirling wheels the mouths the voicesAnd the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heelsThe demons are unleashedIron railsEverything is off-key The broun-roun-roun of the wheelsShocksBouncesWe are a storm under a deaf man's skull...'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away Overheated madness bellows in the locomotivePlague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our wayWe disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding cloudsAnd drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpsesDo like her, do your job'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?”

“Contrasts The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windows ShineThe precious stones of light Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypesThe sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the skyAll is color spotsAnd the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the eveningUnity There's no more unityAll the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutesThere's no more time.There's no more money.In the ChamberThey are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material("Contrasts")”