Paris Peasant Quotes

“Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“Your heart like a hawk-mouth in the sun, your heart like a ship on an atoll, your heart like a compass needle driven mad by a little piece of lead, like washing drying in the wind, like a whining of horses, like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“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.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“Climb down into your idea, inhabit your idea, well-digger hanging from your rope. At first it was only an outline, a halo, and by now it has not got very far, and everywhere I touch upon things which are not that idea of yours, I touch that idea through everything that refutes it, the world expires along its shores. My idea, my idea clings to countless bonds. A long story and I am moved to pity by its scarred form, I kiss the imperfections of its foot.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“The unknown is terribly tempting, and danger even more so. But in its contempt for the instinct of the individual, modern society has done its best to eliminate both of these phenomena : certainly, under present conditions, the unknown no longer exists except for those whose emotions are easily intoxicated, and as for danger, everything visibly assumes an inoffensive hue each day. And yet in love—love of all kinds, whether it is this physical fury, or this spectre, or this diamond-like genie who murmurs to me a name equivalent to coolness—in all love there resides an outlaw principle, an irrepressible sense of delinquency, contempt for prohibitions and a taste for havoc. Confine this hundred-headed passion within the boundaries of your estates, if you will, or requisition whole palaces for it : nothing can stop it surging forth elsewhere, always elsewhere, there where its appearance is least expected, where its splendour is an outburst. Best of all, love thrusts up shoots where no one plants it : how vulgarity convulses it ! it is liable to give sudden wanton twitches. There are maniacs possessed by the street's haunting memory, and only there can they experience the full flow of their nature.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“No further use now for this language, this learning, this whole education through which I was taught to exert myself at the heart of the world. Mirage or mirror, a great enchantment glows in this darkness and leans against the door-jam of ravages in the classic pose assumed by death immediately after shedding her shroud. O my image of bone, here I am: let everything finally decompose in the palace of illusions and silence.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“Like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“It is taken for granted too easily that passion befogs the mind : in fact, it baffles only that vulgar aspect of the mind, diligence. The amusements of lovers and the bemusements of savants remain equally diverting : they represent an identical process of adaptation to a very great objective. I discovered in love, through the very mechanism of love, what the absence of love had prevented me from perceiving. An emanation from this woman, beyond her image, re-formed itself into that same image which then blossomed into a particular world, that taste, that divine taste that I know so well in every vertigo, forewarning me yet again that I was entering this concrete universe which is closed to passers-by. For me, the metaphysical spirit was reborn from love. Love was its source, and I hope never to leave this enchanted forest.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“To poetry they prefer paradise.
Matter of taste.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“What is marvelous is that I should have fled from womankind towards this woman. A vertiginous crossing : the incarnation of thought, and there I am, I cannot conceive of a greater mystery. Yesterday I clutched blindly at empty abstractions. Today a single person dominates me, and I love her, and her absence is an intolerable pain, and her presence . . . Her presence passes my understanding, for every aspect of her, her very power over me, springs from a source beyond nature. An attitude. A word. A single rustle of her dress. O, when the bracelet plays against the flesh.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“Greetings to you, Legendary One : you are a haunted house, and nothing at all would be achieved by sending a delegation of scientists with all their little bits of apparatus to observe the strange phenomena to which you play martyred host. But midnight is not long enough for your adorable ghosts : even the whole day, even the hours of sleep are scarcely sufficient, between your walls a perpetual sound of trailing robes makes you deliciously uneasy, you are in love with this sound. O what queen then has the palace that takes your form the palace from whose vault there once issued a damnable song and a black knight ? Her arms, her beautiful white arms embrace your memory. Your memory ? why no, it is she herself defying time and its quagmires, she is returning through the crannies of your veins, she gives a long, slow smile, is about to speak, the air she sings and breathes is quite changed by some new sovereign thought, she is aroused, she speaks, her breast quivers, and I hear. It is the sound of her heart which marks the beat of all my dreams. Here I am, my love, I have not left you.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

“O imperceptible movements of bodies, you signify, each time, a great philosophical resolution of the shadows : gentle translations, none of the wilfulness of your birth is lost. It is the hour of the frisson which bears an astonishing resemblance to a stroke of black ink. We are delighted to be inkwells.”
― Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant