"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)

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat."
— Anaïs Nin

"A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."
— Émile Michel Cioran

"Be courageous when the mind deceives you
Be courageous
In the final account only this is important"
— Zbigniew Herbert

"“A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.”"
— Zbigniew Herbert (The Collected Poems: 1956-1998)

"We fall asleep on words / we wake among words"
— Zbigniew Herbert

"I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses."
— Julio Cortázar

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone."
— Octavio Paz

"Be careful--with quotations, you can damn anything."
— André Malraux

""All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.""
— Elias Canetti

"I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me."
— Elias Canetti

"Do what he will, he [the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being. "
— Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion)

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"Is sex dirty? Only when it's being done right."
— Woody Allen

"We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss."
— Isaiah Berlin

"Rise and demand; you are a burning flame.
You are sure to conquer there where the final horizon
Becomes a drop of blood, a drop of life,
Where you will carry the universe on your shoulders,
Where the universe will bear your hope."
— Miguel Ángel Asturias

"What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly""
— Slavoj Žižek (The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?)

"Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
— Max Frisch (Homo Faber)

"THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do."
— Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author)

"Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them."
— Luigi Pirandello

"Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart."
— Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays)

"...if you do not even understand what words say,
how can you expect to pass judgement
on what words conceal?"
— H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (Trilogy)

"Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime"
— Theodor W. Adorno

"People know what they want because they know what other people want."
— Theodor W. Adorno

"Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength."
— Theodor W. Adorno

"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living."
— Simone de Beauvoir

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."
— Orhan Pamuk (The New Life)

"As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals."
— Martin Buber

"When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light."
— Martin Buber

"The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God."
— Martin Buber