Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.
I is another.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.
I'm intact, and I don't give a damn.
But the problem is to make the soul into a monster
Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.
I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.
-But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.
As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.
Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?
The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.
Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.
You will always be a hyena.
Eternity is the sun mixed with the sea
True life is elsewhere
What am I doing here?
Morality is the weakness of the mind.
My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?
Unhappiness was my god.
Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?
But, true, I’ve wept too much! Dawns break hearts./ Every moon is brutal, every sun bitter.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
I could never throw Love out of the window.
It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.
And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.
And, in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.
What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?
It is found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea Gone with the sun.
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!
Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!
The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea
O seasons, O castles, What soul is without flaws? All its lore is known to me, Felicity, it enchants us all.
I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.
Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?
Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
Madame X set up a piano in the Alps.
Pagan blood returns!
A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?
Blood was flowing – in Bluebeard’s house, in the abattoirs, in the circuses where God had set his seal to whiten the windows. Blood and Milk flowed together.
Against snow, a tall Beautiful Being. Whistlings of death and circles of muffled music make this adored body rise, swell and tremble like a ghost; scarlet and black wounds open in the magnificent flesh.
I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain.
The same bourgeois magic everywhere the mail train sets you down.
True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
These verses believe; they love; they hope; that is all.
Peut-on s'extasier dans la destruction, se rajeunir par la cruauté !
No one's serious at seventeen, When lindens line the promenades
The world progresses! Why shouldn’t it turn as well?
I saw that all living things were doomed, to bliss: that's not living; it's just a way to waste what we have, a drain.
The Poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.
But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead: Baudelaire is therefore first among seers, the king of poets, a true God.
Cement in bold relief,—far underground. I lean my elbows on the table, and the lamp lights brightly the newspapers I am fool enough to re-read, and the absurd books.
