Charles Baudelaire
Alas! everything is an abyss — action, desire, dreams,Words! — Charles Baudelaire, from “The Abyss,” The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
Category: French Literature
Jacques Derrida
…For who could ever venture a “we” without trembling? — Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (University Of Chicago Press; 1st edition, September 15, 2003)
Albert Camus
Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience ― Albert Camus
Stendhal
One can acquire everything in solitude except character. ― Stendhal, Five Short Novels of Stendhal: The Duchess of Palliano, Vittoria Accoramboni, The Abbess of Castro, Vanina Vanini and The Cenci (Anchor; First Thus Presumed edition, January 1, 1958)
Victor Hugo
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it. — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. (A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie. 1862)
Irène Némirovsky
Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the… Continue reading Irène Némirovsky
Paul Celan,
the wilding convictionthat this is to be said differently thanso. —Paul Celan, from Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, transl. by Pierre Joris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
Michel Houellebecq
There will be difficult days and timesAnd nights of suffering that seem insurmountableWhere we cry stupidly with our arms on the tableWhere suspended life hangs by a thread;My love I sense you walking in the city. — Michel Houellebecq, from “Last Times,” Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013; A Bilingual Edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
Gustaf Sobin
[He] spent long stretches of summer with his beloved. In dream after dream, they’d meet, embrace, and—talking in an animated rush—pass hours, sometimes days, in each other’s company. Even if the dreams only lasted, in actual fact, a matter of minutes, they appeared as if suspended in a time frame entirely their own. In protracted… Continue reading Gustaf Sobin
Arthur Rimbaud
A Dream for Winter In the winter, we shall travel in a little pink railway carriageWith blue cushions.We shall be comfortable. A nest of mad kisses lies in waitIn each soft corner. You will close your eyes, so as not to see, through the glass,The evening shadows pulling faces.Those snarling monsters, a populationOf black devils… Continue reading Arthur Rimbaud
The Vale of Soul-Making 