quotes by André Breton

"My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
"
— André Breton (Poems of Andre Breton: A Bilingual Anthology)

"Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all."
— André Breton (Nadja)

"Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose."
— André Breton (Anthology of Black Humor)

"The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us."
— André Breton

"Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are."
— André Breton

"Un mot et tout est perdu, un mot et tout est sauvé."
— André Breton

"Partir pour le pôle intérieur de soi-même."
— André Breton

"A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether."
— André Breton (Nadja)

"May night continue to fall upon the orchestra"
— André Breton

"The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children."
— André Breton

"Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today."
— André Breton

"with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours."
— André Breton

"Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing."
— André Breton (Anthology of Black Humor)

"
Words make love with one another."
— André Breton

"I love you on the surface of seas
Red like the egg when it is green
"
— André Breton

"The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows"
— André Breton

"The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly"
— André Breton

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."
— André Breton

"Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten."
— André Breton

"Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?"
— André Breton

"Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?"
— André Breton (Anthology of Black Humor)

"At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful."
— André Breton (Anthology of Black Humor)

"It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms."
— André Breton (Anthology of Black Humor)

"Even that great poverty which had been and remains mine let up for a few days. I was not, as it happens, opposed to this poverty: I accepted to pay the price for not being a slave to life, to settle for the right I had assumed once and for all to not express any ideas but my own. We were not many in doing this… Poverty passed by in the distance, made lovelier and almost justified, a little like what has been called, in the case of a painter who was one of your first friends, the blue period. It seemed the almost inevitable consequence of my refusal to behave the way almost all the others did, whether on one side or another. This poverty, whether you had the time to dread it or not, imagine it was only the other side of the miraculous coin of your existence: the Night of the Sunflower would have been less radiant without it. "
— André Breton (L'Amour Fou)

"The sexual eagle exults he will gild the earth once more
his descending wing
his ascending wing sways imperceptibly the sleeves of the peppermint
and all the water's adorable undress
Days are counted so clearly
that the mirror has yielded to a froth of fronds
of the sky i see but one star
now around us there is only the milk describing its dizzy ellipsis
from which sometimes soft intuition with pupils of eyed agate
rises to poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric light
then great reaches cast anchor stretch out in the depths of my closed eyes
icebergs radiating the customs of all the worlds yet to come
bron from a fragment of you fragment unkown and iced on the wing
your existence the giant bouquet escaping fr4om my arms
is badly tied it didgs out walls unrolls the stairs of houses
loses its leaves in the show windows of the street
to gether the news i am always leaving to gather the news
the newspaper is glass today and if letters no longer arrive
it's that the train has been consumed
the great incision of the emerald which gaave birth to the foliage
is scarred for always the sawdust of blinding snow
and the quarries of flesh are sounding along on the first shelf
reversed on this shelf
i take the impression of death and life
to the liquid air"
— André Breton

"There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time"
— André Breton

"Let us not mince words.. the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful."
— André Breton

"to poke its umbrella tip in the mud of the electric light "
— André Breton

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all. "
— André Breton

"I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys."
— André Breton