“I’ve done and been everything that I didn’t want to be or do—Lord, put the light out—so I stand here, beaten up and mauled and weeping, knowing I am not what I thought I was, a good man doing wrong, but the wrong man doing nothing much, and I wouldn’t be telling you about it if I weren’t talking to myself. I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
-Barnes, Nightwood
“Once,” he said, pinching his monocle into place, “I wanted, as you, who are aware of everything, know, to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time; good, perhaps, that that is an impossible ambition for the sane mind. One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.”
-Barnes, Nightwood
“We are but a skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery…Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.”
-Barnes, Nightwood
She prayed, and her prayer was monstrous because in it there was no margin left for damnation or forgiveness, for praise or for blame—those who cannot conceive a bargain cannot be saved or damned. She could not offer herself up; she only told of herself in a preoccupation that was its own predicament.
-Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Terror came. I would fall into a slumber of days, and getting up would go on with the same sad dreams.
-Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
But after a profound caress he would say: “How queer it will seem to you when I am no longer here—all you have gone through. When you no longer have my arm beneath your head, nor my heart for resting place, or these lips upon your eyes. For I shall have to go away, very far away, one day.”
-Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
There are moments when I forget the abjection to which I have fallen; he will make me strong, we will travel, hunt in the deserts, we will sleep on the pavements of unknown cities, uncared for and without a care. Or else I shall awake, and the laws and customs will have changed—thanks to his magic power—or the world, while remaining the same, will leave me to my desires, joys, heedlessness.
-Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
I lent him arms, another face. I saw everything relating to him as he would have liked to create it for himself. When his mind seemed absent, I followed him, yes I, in strange and complicated actions, very far, good or bad: I was certain of never entering his world. How many hours of the night, beside his dear sleeping body I kept watch, trying to understand why he so longed to escape reality. Never a man had such a wish.
-Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
I have never done evil. Light will my days be and I shall be spared repentance.
-Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Each thing, each object, was the result of a miracle, the accomplishing of which filled him with wonder. Likewise each gesture. He did not understand his room, nor the garden, nor the village. He understood nothing, not even that a stone was a stone, and this amazement in the face of what is—a setting by which, by dint of being, ends by no longer being—left him the writhing prey of primitive, simple emotions: grief, joy, pride, shame…
-Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
We cannot tell the truth, it’s not in us.
That truth comes hard. O I am fighting it,
my weapon one: I know I cannot win,
and half the war is lost, that’s to say won.
-Berryman, Henry’s fate & other poems
You did not move, you were not asleep, you were not dreaming, you were in flight, motionless and pale, frozen, straight, stretched out stiff on the flat bed, like a coffin on the sea…
-Genet, Our Lady
I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. To sing it plainly. Without pretending, for example, that I want to be redeemed through it, though I do yearn for redemption…But to kill, to kill you, Jean. Wouldn’t it be a question of knowing how I would behave as I watched you die by my hand?
-Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
Since it is impossible to make a ballet of it, I am forced to use words that are weighed down with precise ideas, but I shall try to lighten them with expressions that are trivial, empty, hollow, and invisible.
-Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
I got rid of the book of fairy tales,
pawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,
found myself back here at six o’clock,
pondering “possible side effects.”
There was no harm in loving then,
no certain good either. But love was loving servants
or bosses. No straight road issuing from it.
Leaves around the door are pencilled losses.
Twenty years to fix it.
Asters blood one way or another.
-Ashbery, “Meaningful Love”
O, I was so bright about you,
my songbird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off center.
At least that’s how it feels to me.
I know it as well as the streets in the map of my imagined
industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past.
There was never any fullness that was going to be;
you waited in line for things, and the stained light was
impenitent.
-John Ashbery, “Poem at the New Year”
The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes.
-Joyce, Portrait
—And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.
—But did so much good, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God that we lived so long and did so much good.
-Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist
Meanwhile do I talk to myself as one who hath time. No one telleth me anything new, so I tell myself mine own story.
-Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
But the worst enemy thou canst meet wilt thou thyself always be; thou waylayest thyself in caverns and forests…A heretic wilt thou be to thyself, and a wizard and a soothsayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate—Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes?
-Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
