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Love

• You cannot save people, you can only love them.
• Age doesn’t protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
• For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.
• You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.
• Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
• I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
• I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality, those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my idea of them.
• Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
• How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
• If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.
• For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.
• Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source.
• The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.
• Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.
• I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
• I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
• Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
• It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.
• To love and to labor is the sum of living.
• I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love.

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Connect with others and yourself

• Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
• Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
• The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.
• You fall in love with people’s minds.
• Each friend represents a world in us.
• Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.
• I love your silences, they are like mine.
• We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.
• All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.
• There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.
• Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.
• There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.
• I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.
• I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.

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Learn to accept imperfection

• Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
• What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.
• What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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Feel intensely and live deeply

• I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.
• The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
• And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
• People living deeply have no fear of death.
• Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
• I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
• I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
• The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
• I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.
• Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
• The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
• Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
• I’m awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
• Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvellous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.
• I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
• The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to choose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation.
• To withhold from living is to die … the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
• I have no brakes on…analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.

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Find wholeness in passion

• The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.
• Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
• I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.
• What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.
• There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
• He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
• To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.
• To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lava, inflammable, unrestrained.
• I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them.

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Find yourself in solitude

• In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.
• Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
• Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
• Solitude may rust your words.

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Make peace with yourself exactly as you are

• My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.
• I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
• Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

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Change every day

• To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects.  They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday.  I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
• I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
• My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.
• Anything I cannot transform into something marvellous, I let go.
• Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
• I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.
• When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.
• To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard.

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Grow

• We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
• I find that life, day by day, is composed of at least one joy, one problem and one sorrow. Then there are the smaller ingredients: you always learn something, whether useful or harmful – that is difficult to analyze until later; you always give something; you alwayou always grow a little in one direction or another.
• The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it.

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Be authentic

• We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.
• She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
• When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
• I don’t tell the truth any more to those who can’t make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.
• The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.
• The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

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Be free

• There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.
• It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

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Come to understand life and living

• You live out the confusions until they become clear.
• My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

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Find truth and meaning

• There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
• The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
• Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
• There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
• One may gain one truth at the expense of another.

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Embrace the power of being a woman

• I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.
• I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.
• How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
• Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.
• For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.
• I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated.
• We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
• It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
• Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

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Embrace imagination

• There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

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Embrace wonder and mystery

• The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
• The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.
• Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.
• The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man – the sense of wonder.

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Embrace eroticism, sensuality and sexuality

• Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.
• The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
• Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
• The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.
• What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.
• The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
• The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to it’s surprises, varied expressions, and mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency.
• Sexual intercourse… a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man’s sensual mast.

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Find joy in the simple

• A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

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Go on an inner journey

• Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
• The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer’s darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.
• We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

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Feed introspection

• Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

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Travel and friendship are gateways into new worlds

• Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
• Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
• We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
• Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.
• The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.
• I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

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Feeling and fantasy contain great power

• I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
• You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
• There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
• I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
• The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live, for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

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Life is a mirror, reflecting our perceptions and beliefs

• We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
• Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.
• The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

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Awakening is a process, a journey of becoming

• There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
• Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
• We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
• You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

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Art and music make us whole

• Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
• Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
• Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.
• We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
• It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
• In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.
• Jazz is the music of the body.
• Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
• Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh … without destroying that moment.
• The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.
• Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.
• Either one fails in one’s art or in one’s life.
• The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
• But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.
• Notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.

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To create is a deep human need

• In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.
• Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
• If you can’t create, you destroy.

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Anxiety, guilt and shame

• Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
• Guilt is the one burden human beings can bear alone.
• Shame is the lie someone taught you about yourself.
• The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.

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Not being authentic

• Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.
• When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
• A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

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Staying in your comfort zone

• If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

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Pain and suffering

• Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.
• The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
• Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
• Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
• Write until it stops hurting.
• Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.
• Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

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Mistakes

• You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

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Stagnation

• When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

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Violence

• Violence is a symptom of impotence.

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Negativity

• You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.

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The death of love

• Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
• The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

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Disconnection

• The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.

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Not accepting others as they are

• We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

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Guilt

• Guilt is the one burden human beings can’t bear alone.

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Retreat from living

• You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.
• I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

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Dreams and dreaming

• Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
• Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
• The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.
• Dreams are necessary to life.
• The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.
• We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.
• You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams.

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Writing

• The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
• We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
• You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.
• The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.
• I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
• It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
• I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease.
• My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
• I write emotional algebra.
• That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.
• We also write to heighten our own awareness of life… We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection… We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it…to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely… When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking… I feel I lose my fire and my color.
• If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
• The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
• Write until it stops hurting.
• The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.
• Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.
• To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.
• I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.
• One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
• When I don’t write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.
• I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

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Books

• There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.
• Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
• Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

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Romance

• I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.
• I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.
• I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.
• There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.
• Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I can’t resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open.
• You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

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Loss

• What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.
• Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
• We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
• Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
• He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.

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Keeping a dairy

• This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
• My diary seems to keep me whole.
• I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.
• Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.
• The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

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Final thoughts

• There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.
• It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
• Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.
• I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.
• Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
• We are never trapped unless we choose to be.
• When you possess light within, you see it externally.
• The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.
• In chaos, there is fertility.
• Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.
• I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.
• Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.
• I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.
• Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
• We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
• We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.
• Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
• When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings…As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.
• If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.
• The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.
• Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.
• The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
• The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
• Memory is a great betrayer.
• There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.

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