Liberty or Love! Quotes

“And if I must follow you to the abyss, follow you I shall!
You are not the passer-by, but the one who remains. The notion of eternity is linked to my love for you. No, you are not the passer-by nor the strange pilot guiding the adventurer through the labyrinth of desire. You have opened to me the country of passion itself. I lose myself in your thoughts more surely than in a desert. And even as I write these lines, I have still not confronted my image of you with your "reality". You are not the passer-by but the eternal lover, whether you wish it or not. Painful joy of the passion aroused by meeting you. I suffer, but my suffering is dear to me, and if I hold my self in any esteem, it is because I have encountered you in my blind rush towards the shifting horizons.”
― Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!

“Two Metro lines, two trains, two carriages, two people walking in parallel streets, two lives, couples criss-crossing without seeing each other, potential encounters, meetings which shall never take place. The imagination rewrites history. It modifies the local directory and the roll-call of those who frequent a town, a street, a house, a woman. It transfixes reflections in the mirror for all eternity. It hangs entire portrait galleries from the wall of our future memory on which magnificent strangers use a sharp knife to engrave their initials and a date.”
― Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!

“Lost between segments of a ferocious horizon, the white-helmeted explorer prepares to die and assembles his memories in order to discover how an explorer should end his days: with his arms outstretched and his face in the sand, or should he dig a fugitive tomb because of wind and hyenas, or just curl up in the so-called broken-gun position which causes so much worry to mothers when they discover that this is the position in which their offspring prefer to fall asleep, or will it be a lion or sunstroke or thirst that does the honours for him.”
― Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!

“From time to time, heavier than a meteorite at its journey's end, a boxer's glove falls. The crowd trampled these memories of kisses and embraces underfoot without paying them the deference they deserved. I alone avoided treading on them. Sometimes I even picked one up. It thanked me with a warm embrace. I felt it tremble in my trouser pocket. Its mistress must have trembled just like that in a fleeting moment of love. I walked on.”
― Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!

“The desire to vanquish, the nihilism always implicit in love, varies according to the weapons which are employed.”
― Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!

“If you do not know me, you whose presence is not even essential to me, it can only mean that this calendar has been badly printed. Your photographs on my walls and the bitter memories that our meetings have impressed upon my heart have only a paltry role in my love! You figure large in my dreams, ever-present, alone on the stage yet destitute of any role.
I encounter you rarely on my path. I am of an age when one begins to contemplate one's emaciated fingers, and at which youth is so full, so real that it cannot be long before it begins to fade. Your lips bring tears to my eyes; you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest.”
― Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!