H W > H's Quotes

“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose. ”
― Charles Baudelaire

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious. ”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window.

It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul

"Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you'll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there. That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees. There's a country after your own heart -- a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!"

My soul does not reply.

"Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land? Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?"

My soul remains mute.

"Does Batavia please you more, perhaps? There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty."

Not a word. -- Is my soul dead?

Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness? If that's the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. -- I've got it, poor soul! We'll pack our bags for Torneo. Let's go even further, to the far end of the Baltic. Even further from life if that is possible: let's go live at the pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness. There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!"

Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: "It doesn't matter where! It doesn't matter where! As long as it's out of this world!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals

“I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

“Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive. ”
― Charles Baudelaire

“It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“I know that pain is the one nobility / upon which Hell itself cannot encroach”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware...Beware...”
― Anne Sexton

“Some women marry houses.”
― Anne Sexton

“And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone. ”
― Anne Sexton

“God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.”
― Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God