Edmond Jabès
Nothingness is a sigh of eternity, a casual avowal of the infinite. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Resemblances. (Wesleyan April 1, 1990)
Category: French Culture
Paul Éluard
Even when we sleep we watch over each otherAnd this love heavier than a lake’s ripe fruitWithout laughter or tears lasts foreverOne day after another one night after us. — Paul Éluard, “Even When We Sleep” Unknown Soure
Albert Camus
When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune. — Albert Camus
Arthur Rimbaud
A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony. A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders. You look away: the new love! You look back,—the new love! “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing… Continue reading Arthur Rimbaud
Gustave Flaubert
It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves,… Continue reading Gustave Flaubert
Albert Camus
I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere. — Albert Camus, The Fall. (Vintage Books May 7, 1991) Originally published 1956.
Violette Leduc
I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.” — Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit. (Riverhead Trade; 1st Riverhead trade paperback ed edition October 15, 1999) Originally published 1970.
Edmond Jabès
Dreams, like memories, are shores we row toward to escape the ever same tomorrows and their cruel futility. Days which cannot express themselves are grey and cold. Mute days whose untidy gestures tear us apart. I have the impression of moving in the shadow of syllables, in regions before secrets, where language cannot yet answer… Continue reading Edmond Jabès
Marcel Proust
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had became curious about their souls. And the universe had appeared to me more interesting. — Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove. (Modern Library… Continue reading Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we… Continue reading Marcel Proust
