“Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.”

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

“The survivors ran through the fields, escapingFrom themselves, knowing they wouldn't returnFor a hundred years. Before them were spreadThose quicksands where a tree changes into nothing,Into an anti-tree, where no borderlineSeparates a shape from a shape, and where,Amid thunder, the golden house of isCollapses, and the word becoming ascends.”

“I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.”

“I imagine the earth when I am no more:Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

“Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “cristallisation,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.”

“I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise.Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound. When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.”