'7 September
"I get lost in conversations. Most often I derive nothing from them but dejection and bitterness. In them I compromise my inner life, everything that is best in me. In order to keep the conversation going I throw into it my favourite thoughts, the ones to which I am most secretly and solicitously attached. My shy and awkward speech disfigures, mutilates them, throwing them out into the bright light in disorder and confusion and only half-dressed. When I go away I gather up and hug to my breast my scattered treasure, trying to put back into place dreams that are bruised like fruit fallen from the tree onto rocks."

Maurice de Guerin

Memorable Quotes of the Weekend.

"Before you can begin your new life you have to let go."

"What's the first rule baby?"
"Never prove yourself to someone."

"I won't be the same with you in front of the others."

"You can't be lost."

A Season in Hell.

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

One evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter - and I insulted her.

I steeled myself against justice.

I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care!

I have withered within me all human hope. With the silent leap of a sullen beast, I have downed and strangled every joy.

I have called for executioners; I want to perish chewing on their gun butts. I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud, and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I have played the fool to the point of madness.

And springtime brought me the frightful laugh of an idiot.

Now recently, when I found myself ready to croak! I thought to seek the key to the banquet of old, where I might find an appetite again.

That key is Charity. - This idea proves I was dreaming!

"You will stay a hyena, etc...," shouts the demon who once crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Seek death with all your desires, and all selfishness, and all the Seven Deadly Sins."

Ah! I've taken too much of that: - still, dear Satan, don't look so annoyed, I beg you! And while waiting for a few belated cowardices, since you value in a writer all lack of descriptive or didactic flair, I pass you these few foul pages from the diary of a Damned Soul.

Arthur Rimbaud

In women
I see
Their blogs, their cups of tea.
Our search for beauty,
Truth,
Humanity.

[Cuverville] 17 June
     Mius is gaining skill in hybridizing flowers; and I have finally succeeded in convincing him that, in the beds of seedlings thus obtained, the least robust varieties often gave the most beautiful flowers. But it is only with great difficulty that I can get him to set aside the common, vigorous varieties that can get along without his attentions, in order to favour those that are harder to cultivate and require his care.
     If among her artists, Greece does not count a single Spartan, is this not because Sparta threw her puny children into pits?
     Impossible to get Mius to admit that, in order to assure selection, it is not enough to prefer the delicate and rare variety, that its difficult victory over the commoner varieties must be assured by suppressing the latter in its vicinity.
     To avoid argument he pretends to clear my garden of them; but I find them a little later, transplanted in some corner, just as rugged as the rare variety is fragile, and infinitely prolific. In less than two years they have won back their place; the exquisite has disappeared, stifled by the commonplace. Because, for flowers too, 'the exquisite is as difficult as it is rare'; and however beautiful the most modest flower of the fields may be, one's heart weeps to think that the most beautiful always has the least chance of survival. It is at one and the same time the least gifted for the struggle and the one that most arouses appetites and jealousies. Oh, if only man, instead of so often contributing to the spreading of the vulgar, instead of systematically pursuing with his hatred or his cupidity the natural ornament of the earth, the most colourful butterfly, the most charming bird, the largest flower; if he brought his ingenuity to bear on protecting, not on destroying but favouring . . .
     Were a miracle to produce in our woods some astounding orchid, a thousand hands would stretch out to tear it up, to destroy it. If the bluebird happens to fly past, every gun is sighted; and then people are amazed that it is rare!

- Journals 1889-1949, André Gide