Jonathan Duran > Jonathan's Quotes

“Words make love with one another.”
― Andre Breton

“...the new world, the communo-bourgeois, sermonizing, Tartuffian, automobilistic, alcoholic, gluttonous and cancerous world has only two anxieties: ass and bank account...”
― Louis Ferdinand Celine

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”
― Tristan Tzara

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
― Jean Cocteau

“But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”
― Andre Breton, Nadja

“I want the world to bleed when it brushes up against me.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, I Am the Fire That Flares Up Again

“I want to give a beautiful speech at the end of the world - a rousing and inspiring collection of thoughts expressed eloquently through a dying language that is ultimately too little too late; absurd and utterly meaningless - almost insulting as life burns away.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, I Am the Fire That Flares Up Again

“Silent, scarlet picking though this grand new year, an optimistic premise promised with sickening cheer. So please, pull up a chair and take a stand for all grand intentions. List your resolutions then kindly re-arrange them. Departmentalize your wicked, wonton ways - tell me all about yourself, but spend the most time on the things you hate. Pull out all your in-efficacious and ridiculous disguises; put on a simple act but perform it with abandon. Put your heart and your soul into the fire. Burn your thoughts before you think them, burn them up and take their stink in.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, I Am the Fire That Flares Up Again

“Anthony honed the razor along the old leather strop and stared intently at the metal blade as it went up and down, flipping back and forth, with the light exploding off of it like a series of quiet, hypnotic explosions.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, Cherries in the Snow

“When she spoke, her voice sang as if a thousand different religions had crawled into her throat to die. All faiths scrambled to rewrite their holy books, recomposing them to abet her every urge. All words she pronounced became gospel, every tremble of her flesh a great crusade against all non-believers.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, Cherries in the Snow

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.”
― Louis Aragon

“comme il allait de con en con
Il devint terriblement triste
comme il allait de con en con
Terriblement triste”
― Louis Aragon

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“One quick snort and the pharmaceutical worm burrows deeper into my heart.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, I Am the Fire That Flares Up Again