Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague Quotes

“Suicide is the resource of men whose springs have been devoured by rust, the springs of the quotidian. They were born for action, but they put it off; and then action comes to them on the pendulum's return. Suicide is an act, an act of those who are unable to perform any other.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“In the art of photography, truth is achieved only by deceit; but these deceits are delicate, they correct and annihilate cach other to isolate an indestructible residue.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“Addicts are the mystics of a materialist age who, no longer having the strength to animate objects, to sublimate them into symbols, undertake a converse labor of reduction—eroding them, wearing them down until the kernel of nothingness within each appears. Addicts offer sacrifices to a symbolism of shadows to combat a fetishism of the sun—they loathe the sun because it hurts their tired eyes.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, The Fire Within

“He picked up his pen, hesitated, took courage, touched the paper, marked it. An affecting moment: Alain was approaching life. He had been taught, in certain literary circles he had once frequented, to distrust literature. In that attitude he had found a line of least resistance which suited his frivolity, his laziness. Moreover, rejecting life as he did, he could not imagine anything except what he called, with a justifiable scorn, literature—that purposeless exercise which absorbed the energy of those very people who had inspired his scorn. He could not conceive a profound and compelling sort of investigation in which a man turns to art to discover his own sense of direction, his own characteristics. And now, without wanting to, without knowing it, by an instinctive leap, he had taken the path that led directly to the grave mysteries he had always avoided. Since he was experiencing the unforeseen benefits to be derived from writing, he might have been able, henceforth, to grasp its function: to create an ordered universe in which the writer can live. For the first time in his life, he was putting a semblance of order into his feelings, and he immediately began to breathe a little, no longer choked by those feelings which were not complex, but so tangled, so tightly knotted because they had never been articulated. Would he not realize that it had been wrong to give up, to declare, without having ever really looked, that the world is nothing, that it has no substance?”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, The Fire Within

“he used to talk about suicide. But murder fondled in such fashion was a free, voluntary act; now, an alien and stupid power had appropriated that unmotivated vow, which had been no more, perhaps, than an explosion of fierce vitality, and this power was pushing him down the monotonous corridor of disease toward a slow death.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, The Fire Within

“Je n'ai pas des angoisses, je suis dans une angoisse perpétuelle.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“Ho cominciato con l’aspettare le donne, e il denaro, bevendo. E poi all’improvviso mi sono accorto di aver consumato la mia vita ad attendere, e sono intossicato a morte”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“Ho sognato due o tre cose alla volta, non ho mai desiderato nulla”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“E nello specchio, si guardò alle spalle. Questa camera vuota, questa solitudine… Provò un brivido immenso che lo afferrò alle reni e al midollo, correndogli lungo la schiena dalla testa ai piedi come un fulmine di ghiaccio: la morte gli fu davanti in tutta la sua evidenza. Era la solitudine, se n’era servito come di un coltello per minacciare la vita, ed ora questo coltello si rivoltava e gli perforava le viscere. Più nessuno, più nessuna speranza. Un isolamento irrimediabile.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“Un uomo solitario è un illusionista.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague

“J'aurais tant voulu être aimé qu'il me semble que j'aime.”
― Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le feu follet suivi de Adieu à Gonzague