Nadja Quotes

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

I am the soul in limbo.

A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.

Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.

Again begins the ridiculous, terrible waiting, in which we do not know which object to move, which gesture to repeat—what to do in order to make what we are waiting for happen.

Elle me dit son nom, celui qu'elle s'est choisi: « Nadja, parce qu'en russe c'est le commencement du mot espérance, et parce que ce n'en n'est que le commencement.

Le coeur humain, beau comme un sismographe.

Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us…

La vie est autre que ce qu'on écrit.

How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is -- it can only be -- the vigor of his protest against it.

…It would be hateful to refuse whatever she asks of me, one way or another, for she is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously, for life.

…I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they’d leave me alone.

I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.

Vous ne pourrez jamais voir cette étoile comme je la voyais. Vous ne comprenez pas : elle est comme le cœur d'une fleur sans cœur.

The things my mother did not see about herself, I did not see, either.

Sur le point de m’en aller, je veux lui poser une question qui résume toutes les autres, une question qu’il n’y a que moi pour poser, sans doute: "Qui êtes-vous?" Et elle, sans hésiter: "Je suis l’âme errante.

Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can’t hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. 'Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there's that broken spurt again, that fall ... and so on indefinitely.

Je préfère, encore une fois, marcher dans la nuit à me croire celui qui marche dans le jour.

The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.

Nadja, who is always hunting for a man, but always the wrong one, is trying to get together with Ebbe’s brother Karsten, who she would fit like a ring in his nose.

I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

Almost everything important in life is invisible.

Oh Nadja!" my mother said. 'You're still stuck in your black-and-white phase of good and evil. The world is more complicated than that.

For some reason she leaves a very strong impression on me. She looks exactly how I picture Nadja, André Breton's Nadja.

But Nadja sensed his intention and said, It was just a game. You take captivity too seriously. If anything, surrender will liberate you from the burden of yourself.

It was really a star, a star you were heading toward. You can't fail to reach it. Hearing you speak, I felt that nothing would hold you back, nothing, not even me. . . . You could never see this star as I do. You don't understand: It's like the heart of a heartless flower.

Hacía mucho tiempo que yo había dejado de entenderme con Nadja. Lo cierto es que quizás nunca nos hemos entendido, al menos acerca de la manera deafrontar las cosas sencillas de la existencia.

Unless you have been inside a sanitarium you do not know that madmen are made there, just as criminals are made in our reformatories. Is there anything more detestable than these systems of so-called social conservation which, for a peccadillo, some initial and exterior rejection of respectability or common sense, hurl an individual among others whose association can only be harmful to him and, above all, systematically deprive him of relations with everyone whose moral or practical sense is more firmly established than his own?

I turned my copy over to reread the back cover: always a creepy experience once you had finished a book, like getting a message from a dead person. “Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written,” it said.

Par-delà toutes sortes de goûts que je me connais, d'affinités que je me sens, d'attirances que je subis, d'événements qui m'arrivent et n'arrivent qu'à moi, par-delà quantité de mouvements que je me vois faire, d'émotions que je suis seul à éprouver, je m'efforce, par rapport aux autres hommes, de savoir en quoi consiste, sinon à quoi tient, ma différenciation. N'est-ce pas dans la mesure exacte où je prendrai conscience de cette différenciation que je me révélerai ce qu'entre tous les autres je suis venu faire en ce monde et de quel message unique je suis porteur (...) ?

According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all

Time is a tease. Time is a tease–because everything has to happen in its own time.

When it comes to human suffering, appearance is everything.

Who are you?" And she, without a moment's hesitation. "I am the soul in limbo.

[Perhaps] I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I’ve forgotten.

Puisque tu existes, comme toi seule sais exister, il n'était peut-être pas très nécessaire que ce livre existât. J'ai cru pouvoir en décider autrement, en souvenir de la conclusion que je voulais lui donner avant de te connaître et que ton irruption dans ma vie n'a pas à mes yeux rendue vaine. Cette conclusion ne prend même son vrai sens et toute sa force qu'à travers toi.

Todo aquello que siento la tentación de comenzar, que requiere un sostenido esfuerzo, hace que me sienta demasiado seguro de que no estoy a la altura de la vida tal como yo la amo y se me ofrece: la vida hasta perder el aliento.

Indeed, most mornings she wakes with a heart that still beats, but is heavy with defeatist thoughts about the futility of life, her life, and, reluctant to face the day she burrows deeper into the covers, seeking shelter in darkness. Unhelpfully, she remembers that she is alone in the world, and not as smart and "with it" as others seem to be, and that her only true talents are hope and delusion. But, she reminds herself, she does have a gift: she is tenacious. And being tenacious means she wants to live. Wanting to live means she must compete, she must participate. She tells herself that these bad, early-morning thoughts are just the residue of some dream she dreamt in the night, and that the sooner she is up and running, the better, and soon she does, she jumps out of bed with sudden determination, and the mere physicality of movement alters something in her brain, and she is awake and back in the column of the living.

I saw all the ways in which she worked to be a very different mother from her own. And I also saw how much the past, so long kept secret, pulled us into formations like a deep ocean current, from so far below that we barely knew we were not moving on our own.

Respectfully I kiss her lovely teeth and she says, slowly, gravely, the second time a few notes higher than the first: 'Communion takes place in silence...Communion takes place in silence.' This, she explains, is because this kiss leaves her with the impression of something sacred, where her teeth 'substituted for the host.

(...) Sí, por las tardes, hacia las siete, le gusta encontrarse en un vagón de segunda mano del metro. La mayoría de los pasajeros son personas que regresan de sus trabajos. Se sienta entre ellos, trata de sorprender en sus caras el motivo de sus preocupaciones. Naturalmente, están pensando en lo que acaban de abandonar hasta mañana, sólo hasta mañana, y también en lo que les espera esta noche, lo cual les alegra o les preocupa aún más. Nadja se queda mirando fijamente algo definido: «Hay buenas personas». Más alterado de lo que quisiera mostrarme, ahora sí me enojo: «Pues no. Además tampoco se trata de eso. El hecho de que soporten el trabajo, con o sin las demás miserias, impide que esas personas sean interesantes. Si la rebeldía no es lo más fuerte que sienten, ¿cómo podrían aumentar su dignidad sólo con eso? En esos momentos, por lo demás, usted les ve; ellos ni siquiera la ven a usted. Por lo que a mí se refiere, yo odio, con todas mis fuerzas, esa esclavitud que pretenden que considere encomiable. Compadezco al hombre por estar condenado a ella, porque por lo general no puede evitarla, pero si me pongo de su parte no es por la dureza de su condena, es y no podría ser más que por la energía de su protesta. Yo sé que en el horno de la fábrica, o delante de esas máquinas inexorables que durante todo el día imponen la repetición del mismo gesto, con intervalos de algunos segundos, o en cualquier otro lugar bajo las órdenes más inaceptables, o en una celda, o ante un pelotón de ejecución, todavía puede uno sentirse libre, pero no es el martirio que se padece lo que crea esa libertad. Admito que esa libertad sea un perpetuo librarse de las cadenas: será preciso, por añadidura, para que ese desencadenarse sea posible, constantemente posible, que las cadenas no nos aplasten, como les ocurre a muchos de los que usted me habla. Pero también es, y quizá mucho más desde el punto de vista humano, la mayor o menor pero, en cualquier caso, la maravillosa sucesión de pasos que le es dado al hombre hacer sin cadenas. Esos pasos, ¿les considera usted capaces de darlos? ¿Tienen tiempo de darlos, al menos? ¿Tienen el valor de darlos? Buenas personas, decía usted, sí, tan buenas como las que se dejaron matar en la guerra, ¿verdad? Digamos claro lo que son los héroes: un montón de desgraciados y algunos pobres imbéciles. Para mí, debo confesarlo, esos pasos lo son todo. Hacia dónde se encaminan, ésa es la verdadera pregunta. De algún modo, acabarán trazando un camino y, en ese camino, ¿quién sabe si no surgirá la manera de quitar las cadenas o de ayudar a desencadenarse a los que se han quedado en el camino? Sólo entonces será conveniente detenerse un poco, sin que ello suponga desandar lo andado». (Bastante a las claras se ve lo que puedo decir al respecto, sobre todo a poco que decida tratarlo de manera concreta.) Nadja me escucha y no intenta contradecirme. Tal vez lo último que ella haya querido hacer sea la apología del trabajo.

Je suis extrêmement ému. Pour faire diversion je demande où elle dîne. Et soudain cette légèreté que je n’ai vue qu’à elle, cette liberté peut-être précisément : "Où (le doigt tendu :) mais là, où là (les deux restaurants les plus proches), où je suis, voyons. C’est toujours ainsi. " Sur le point de m’en aller, je veux lui poser une question qui résume toutes les autres, une question qu’il n’y a que moi pour poser, sans doute : "Qui êtes-vous ? " Et elle, sans hésiter : "Je suis l’âme errante.

With or without 'college' we are able to use our senses by perceiving the world around us, that in turn shapes and creates ones own reality. Perception is reality. My 'reality' is not the same as your 'reality' since we all have a different mental database, life experience, physiology, different characteristics, environments we grew up and people we hang out with, etc. I might fall in love with a certain smell while it triggers bad memories for someone else. Same goes for the other senses while perceiving 'reality'. And how real is this so called 'reality' anyway? Our senses can be quite limited compared to a camera or other living creatures on the planet. There are sounds and colours humans can not detect with their senses. We in fact do not perceive the whole 'picture'. The most important things in life are unseen. My point is that we do not need hierarchic, indoctrinating, and capitalized institution called 'science' to tell us what, when, why, and how to think, experiment, sense, and live our lives. Long before there was any 'science', there was sense first.

Ihr netter Animateur von gestern, er war ein arabischer Terrorist?

Sie war in den Händen von irren Weltverbesserern, wo zur Hölle sollte all das enden?

Empecé a hablarle a Nadja con emoción, y no sin cierto cinismo, del verdugo sediento de sangre que se había convencido a sí mismo de que él era una víctima inocente del destino. De un criminal que me había querido convencer de su inocencia. Y también de cómo me seducía la posibilidad de dejarme atrapar por el tipo de relato que convierte la responsabilidad individual en algo inatrapable, que deja todas las cosas en manos del todopoderoso destino. Le expliqué que Nedeljko tenía fe en el destino y que su fe era liberadora, de la misma manera que todas las demás fes que ayudan a enfrentar lo que es imposible enfrentar. (...) Le dije en confianza que para mí lo que Nedeljiko llamaba destino representaba lo mismo que Dios.

There was something about Mikie that made me want to trust him. It might have been the Centanario Anejo.

Qui vive? Est-ce vous, Nadja? Est-il vrai que l’au-delà, tout l’au-delà soit dans cette vie? Je ne vous entends pas. Qui vive? Est-ce moi seul? Est-ce moi-même?

On est venu, il y a quelques mois, m'apprendre que Nadja était folle.

Long before there was any science there was commons sense first.

Hank remembered his first therapy session. I just want you to fix me. He’d begged Nadja. Fix me. He still had nightmares from watching the footage of that police raid gone wrong. He probably always would. There was no fixing that. But Hank had realized over the past few weeks that he didn’t need to be fixed. He was a work in progress and that was okay. He liked a project.

Puis, soudain, se plaçant devant moi, m'arrêtant presque, avec cette manière extraordinaire de m'appeler, comme on appellerait quelqu'un, de salle en salle, dans un château vide: "André? André?... Tu écriras un roman sur moi. Je t'assure. Ne dis pas non. Prends garde, tout s'affaiblit, tout disparait. De nous il faut que quelque chose reste...""-Nadja

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone–over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience–I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call; where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.

La maison de mon coeur est prête Et ne s'ouvre qu'à l'avenir. Puisqu'il n'est rien que je regrette, Mon bel époux, tu peux venir.

Then suddenly, standing in front of me, virtually stopping me, with that extraordinary way she had of calling me, the way you might call someone from room to room in an empty castle: 'André? André?...You will write a novel about me. I'm sure you will. Don't say you won't. Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us...

She uses a new image to make me understand how she lives: it's like the morning when she bathes and her body withdraws while she stares at the surface of the bath water. 'I am the thought on the bath in the room without mirrors.

Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

The overriding aim of club design, whatever its manifestation, is to create a sense of entering a new world. The magical realms that arise as a result tend to heighten this effect by turning their backs on the 'outside'.... What remains when the sun has risen and the line of people queuing to get in has melted away. It's not the stamp on your hand, seldom the new lover in your arms, and hopefully not the ringing in your ears. What remains is the feeling of a wonderful night out. You've danced, sweated, laughed, defied sleep, and the pressures of daily life, much like the spectacular venues that allow music and people to melt into one.

With the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

I knew everything, so hard have I tried to read in my streams of tears.

Whatever desire or even illusion I may have had to the contrary, perhaps I have not been adequate to what she offered me. But what was she offering me? It does not matter. Only love in the sense I understand it–mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering, and certain love that can only be foolproof, might have permitted the fulfillment of a miracle.

Surely this is no more unreasonable than asking some saint or divinity what one should do.

May the great living and echoing unconsciousness which inspires my only conclusive acts in any sense I always believe in, dispose forever of all that is myself. I gladly renounce any possibility of taking back what here, again, I bestow upon it. Once more I want to recognize and rely on it alone and virtually at my leisure wander along its immense piers, staring at some shining dot I know is in my own eye and which saves me all collision with its night fright.

All I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because nothing can be substituted for you, and because for me it was for all eternity that this succession of terrible or charming enigmas was to come to an end at your feet. You are not an enigma for me. I say that you have turned me from enigmas forever.

I see beauty as I have seen you. As I have seen what, at the given hour and for a given time which I hope and with all my soul believe may recur, granted you to me. Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left.

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be at all.

I was unhappy there in the way presumptuous young people often are in their first jobs. I believed I could see all of the company’s dysfunction and the solutions to it. Yet, despite my extraordinarily clear memos, my superiors refused to let me overhaul the organization.

She could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched.

Desde el primero hasta el último día, tuve a Nadja por un genio libre, algo así como uno de esos espíritus etéreos a los que determinadas prácticas de magia permiten atraerse momentáneamente, pero que de ninguna manera podrían ser sometidos.

Aunque haya podido desearlo, aunque quizás también haya podido ilusionarme con ello, quizás no estuve a la altura de lo que ella me proponía. Pero ¿qué me proponía? Poco importa. Sólo el amor en el sentido en que yo lo entiendo —pero, en ese caso, el misterioso, el improbable, el único, el que todo lo une y el indudable amor— tal y como a fin de cuentas sólo puede ser a toda prueba, hubiera podido en este caso obrar el milagro.

Anh có trông thấy gì trong hàng cây ấy không? Màu xanh với gió, gió xanh. Có độc một lần kia em có trông thấy gió xanh trong mấy cây ấy. Chỗ ấy, từ một khung cửa sổ tư dinh Henri IV, và lúc đó, người bạn của em, người mà em đã kể với anh, sửa soạn bỏ đi...

Muchas veces he vuelto a ver a Nadja, su pensamiento se me ha hecho aún más inteligible, y su expresión ganó en agilidad, en originalidad, en profundidad. Es muy posible que al mismo tiempo el desastre irreparable que arrastraba consigo una parte de ella misma, la más humanamente precisa, ese desastre que advertí aquel día, me haya alejado paulatinamente de ella.

Le coeur humain est beau comme un sismographe.

Ne pas alourdir ses pensées du poids de ses souliers

Nhan sắc sẽ là nhan sắc CO QUẮP hoặc sẽ không là gì cả.

[…] Poi ebbe luogo un lungo pranzo, con gelatina e biscotti per dessert, al termine del quale Nadja raccolse i piatti, li portò nel cucinotto all’esterno e disse a Zhenja: “Li lasciamo, che dici? Poi dopo cena lavo tutto insieme…” Zhenja fu d’accordo, anche lei non aveva un grande entusiasmo per il lavare le stoviglie nella bacinella unta di grasso, e si ritrò con piacere nella stanza piccola, dove trovava posto soltanto la sua branda e il comodino con i libri. Zhenja si distese, riflettè per un po’ sul modo in cui era di nuovo franata la sua disordinata vita personale, ma poi scacciò quel pensiero, in dieci anni ormai diventato seccante, e prese in mano un libro intelligente, non proprio pane per i suoi denti, ma necessario per chissà quali inconcepibili sensazioni… Inforcò gli occhiali, si munì di una matita fina per scrivere i punti interrogativi sui margini e… e immediatamente s’addormentò nel sottofondo della meravigliosa musica stratificata che viene eseguita in una casa di campagna quando piove: lo scroscio delle gocce contro le foglie, i colpi isolati sul vetro, le tenui onde sonore al minimo cambio di vento, lo schiocco delle gocce sulla superficie d’acqua scura nella botte e il suono staccato del rivolo che scorre lungo la grondaia.

Vanity dulls the senses.

When it comes to suffering, appearance is everything.

Long before there was any 'science', there was sense first.

To lose my thoughts and beliefs, and to find my soul, I go to both friend and enemy, my teacher, my guide, my home, my escape, my questions and answers, my thirst and my eagerness, my passion, my hunger and craving, my sorrow and happiness, my source and inspiration. I'm speaking of Nature, that gives us literally everything we know. From our knowledge, medicine, food, water, air, clothing and shelter, to its creative and medicinal/restorative ways of making us feel deeply and spiritually connected to life when spending time in nature, and its mezmerizing confrontation with the profound mysteries in life. Bringing us, no matter who we are and where we are from, in contact with the past and future, with the cycles of life, with the tasty and the toxic, the good and the bad, the micro and the macro, the soft and the hard, the ugly and the beautiful, the death and re-birth, the ebbs & the flows, the wholeness and relationship & inter-relatedness of nature and life itself. Its incredible diversity in all her glory that teaches us that we absolutely without a doubt must avoid the forcing/pressure of standardization of protocols/constucts/models in which just one way of living or model of development predominates. I believe our purpose is quiet simple. It is to love. To love oneself and each other, to love all life and to love our Mother Earth for She teaches us, nurtures us, feeds us and shelter us, and for eventually we will turn into Earth. Life is beautiful because it does not last forever.

Our planet is about ... billions of years old. So far, the earliest finds of modern human skeletons come from Africa, which date to nearly 200,000 years ago. We have made such an advanced technological progress, but here we are today, still condemning women based on their sexuality and celebrate it every year. This very 'social' movement is the enemy of women and humanity in general for it is feeding the labels, categorizations, divisions, and inequalities for somewhat 100 years now. Since its inception somewhere in the early 1900s, women were finally given(external) 'rights' allowing us to work and even vote. There used to be and quite outrageously still is a huge inequality in the functions/roles of men and women in homes, workplaces and in civil society. Women were then seen as inferior and still are today, mainly because economic achievement has become one of the most important foundation and determinant in the worthiness/value of an individual. "Womens day" pretends to celebrate women but the opposite is true. Through its systematized, preplanned and preconstructed feminist surrogate, women have been slowly but steadily stripped off a secure, nurturing sacred and honoured image as wives, mothers, but above all as procreating human beings representing life and its backbone, are turned into cheap, brainless, sexual objects and hostages of the economy. And whenever the tyranny of materialism and capitalism ends, and we the people as a whole recognize the inherent, deep rootedness and nature of human beings, will the female sex be liberated from feminism.

Nadja turned away from Josephine, turned so her body lay closer to the forests and the moon. Nonetheless, Josephine went on with her story, indiscreetly and carelessly. She did not even know Nadja and must have assumed the girl was like the others in View Royal, who had listened to her story and been both skeptical and unconcerned. Nadja, in her worn white T-shirt, with her slightly slanting green eyes and rare Russian surname, was in fact very much unlike the others in View Royal, and, thus, Josephine would have been wiser to not boast so callously.

We knew, my brother and I, that it was only fear that led to danger. My mother cast around us her conviction that we would always be safe, and it held us like a force field.

My father’s graphic novel Maus about his parents’ experiences in the concentration camps, won a Pulitzer Prize when I was five.

I consider myself as a Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Zarathust etc. but foremost as a ''Human. One that visits mosques, synagoges, churches and temples of all kinds with the most sacred being my own temple. Now to exclude one piece of puzzle of the whole is to exclude the whole entirely. For the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

Having a writer in the family is like having a murderer in the family.

But Nadja was poor, which in our time is enough to condemn her, once she decided not to behave entirely according to the imbecile code of good sense and good manners.

She was, finally, strong, and extremely weak, as one can be, in that idea she had always had but in which I had only too warmly encouraged her, which I had only too readily aided her in giving supremacy over all the rest: the idea that freedom, acquired here on earth at the price of a thousand-and the most difficult-renunciations, must be enjoyed as unrestrictedly as it is granted, without pragmatic considerations of any sort, and this because human emancipation-conceived finally in its simplest revolutionary form, which is no less than human emancipation in every respect, by which I mean, according to the means at every man's disposal-remains the only cause worth serving.

I strive in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate.

We have said nothing about Chirico until we take into account his most personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool.

La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas

I remarked on the quai of the Vieux-Port in Marseille, shortly before sunset, a curiously scrupulous painter struggling with skill and speed on his canvas against the fading light. The spot of color corresponding to the sun gradually descended with the sun. Finally, nothing remained. The painter suddenly discovered he was far behind: he obliterated the red from a wall, painted over one of two last gleams lingering on the water. His painting, finished for himself, for me the most unfinished thing possible, looked very sad and beautiful.