“It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.”

“The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.”

“A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.”

“En France, on a d'abord considéré la bonté comme une forme de la bêtise, la méchanceté comme une forme de l'intelligence. Maintenant la politesse est considérée comme du temps perdu.”

“Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!”

“Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.”

“An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.”