Great Throughts Treasury

"It is totally different from my philosophical work."

"It makes me cry, I want to talk about something I am not sure I can talk about, I want to talk about the inside from the inside, I do not want to leave it. I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread."

"It was the first play we were ever involved in together... and, because it was concerned with the condition of French convicts, we performed it - we began to perform it - in front of a French prison. It lasted for precisely four minutes because the police arrived and closed it down."

"It's this human porosity that bothers me and that I can't escape since it is the faith of my skin, the extra sense which is everywhere in my being, this lack of eyelids on the face of the soul, or perhaps this imaginary lack of imaginary lids, this excessive facility I have for catching others, I am caught by persons or things animated or unanimated that I don't even frequent, and even the verb catch I catch or rather I am caught by it, for, note this please, it's not I who wish to change, it's the other who gets his hooks in me for lack of armor. All it takes is for me to be plunged for an hour or less into surroundings where the inevitable occurs--cafe, bus, hair salon, train carriage, recording studio--there must be confinement and envelopment, and there I am stained intoxicated, practically any speaker can appropriate my mental cells and poison my sinuses, shit, idiocies, cruelties, vulgar spite, trash, innumerable particles of human hostility inflame the windows of my brain and I get off the transport sick for days. It isn't the fault of one Eichmann or another. I admit to being guilty of excessive receptivity to mental miasma. The rumor of a word poisons me for a long time. Should I read or hear such and such a turn of phrase or figure of speech, right away I can't breathe my mucous membranes swell up, my lips go dry, I am asthmaticked, sometimes I lose my balance and crash to the ground, or on a chair if perchance one is there, in the incapacity of breathing the unbreathable."

"Knowledge from experience: the heart goes blind because the need is stronger than anything else. Your ego is blind, your id is eager. It will get to the point of smashing everything. When there is a danger from outside, you bolt, but when the danger comes from inside, how can you bolt? The danger from inside is that complicated thing, the love of the wolf, the complicity that attaches us to that which threatens us."

"Language is a country in which scenes comparable to what is happening, for example, at this moment in France, in the domain of the opening or the closing of borders, are played out in the linguistic and poetic mode."

"Let us not speak ill of evil it's too easy. And let us follow the wise advice of Jacques Derrida in Circumfession and take an interest in the experience of evil."

"Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't speak, she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally sup- ports the logic of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when theoretical or political, is never simple or linear or objectified, generalized: she draws her story into history."

"Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment."

"Make can mean make. make. make and truth can be heard truly as truth. truth. truth..."

"Me too, I make do, I anoint what cannot be fixed."

"Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs."

"Mixed with the punishment, or before it or being it, literature makes its entry in the form of Avowal or Confession."

"Myth ends up having our hides. Logos opens up its great maw and swallows us whole."

"Never has a theory inspired my poetic texts. It is my poetic text that sits down from time to time on a bench or else at a caf‚ table - that's what I am in the process of doing at this moment by the way - to make itself heard in univocal, more immediately audible terms. In other words, it is always a last resort for me. So no, it does not provide an additional ethico-political structure; it is the concession a poet makes in accepting pedagogic responsibility."

"No one fragment carries the totality of the message, but each text (which is in itself a whole) has a particular urgency, an individual force, a necessity, and yet each text also has a force which comes to it from all the other texts."

"Now the fashionable code, these days, holds subjectivity, which is confused (unwittingly or not) with individualism, in suspicion: there is confusion -- and this is a pity for everyone -- between the infinite domain of the human subject, which is, of course, the primary territory of every artist and every creature blessed with the difficult happiness of being alive, and stupid egotistic, restrictive, exclusive behavior which excludes the other."

"Old tattered albums. Respect for the tattered-ness. The tattered-ness is the secret: portrait of the family memory. Album, memory, cemetery, abandoned. One goes forward, sowing the stones of grief behind oneself. Album of abandonment. Faithful to the abandonment. Respect the abandonment. To the question: how have these frail objects survived, how have they resisted, will they resist the teeth of time? not to respond."

"Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way."

"People either know or don't know that I have four or five forms of written expression: poetic fiction, chamber theater or theater on a world scale, criticism, essays -- without counting the notebooks I write only to myself and which no one will ever read, where I exercise a different style."

"Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside."

"Perhaps within me the desire to put off that which I most in the world desire of late keeps watch, I mean, to write a book but a wounded book, a contentious, broken book, a book not pleased to be a book, to be only a book, to be born in the absence of my friend, a book incapable of acting as if the last times were not upon us, but which at the same time cannot act as if it were only a book hence a being unaware of the end, unaware what time it is."

"Philosophically speaking, the whole show deals with different aspects of the paradoxes of hospitality,"

"Promethea has awakened in my dreams extinguished for thousands of years; sometimes one catches on fire even through so many icy layers. Promethea has rekindled dreams of fire in me, dreams of abysses, they are terribly dangerous dreams: as long as they are dreams alone, as long as one dreams alone, one can fool around with dreaming, because afterward one forgets. But now, ever since I learned how Promethea brings the fire of all dreams up into reality, how she climbs back up through the shaft of the Red Cows, bearing the first fire, how she crosses the Chamber of the Mares, how she goes through every epoch of existence reawakening along the walls memories of times so fragile and so inflammable, and comes out in 1982 still carrying in her hands the primitive spark, I feel myself wavering between exultation and terror. Formerly, I too sucked satiny coals. Once I burned my tongue. (That only happens if someone makes you lose faith.) Ever since I have no longer dared suck real fire; for a long time I lived on electricity. But I have never forgotten the fiery taste of eternity. I just was sure that I could live with my tongue extinguished until the end of my days. I was not even tempted. I was calm. I had firm definitions. I called happiness the absence of unhappiness. I wrote in ink and I dedicated my dreams to the Moons."

"Quickening.They have to be written to the quick, on the now, Live, All these scenes, all these events which only happen once...If you do not grab them in the instant they pass, these pulsations are lost forever."

"Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book?s door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover, and in broad daylight escape! We are no longer there: this is what real reading is. If we haven?t left the room, if we haven?t gone over the wall, we?re not reading."

"She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak?the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible."

"So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn?t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality that we carry. We don?t know that we?re alive as long as we haven?t encountered death: these are the banalities that have been erased. And is isan act of grace."

"So little by little I climb towards life, in the straitjacket of my prison. I don't waste an ounce of air or sun. I explore I bring to light."

"Suddenly I'd had Enough and this was no turn of phrase but a warm body, nervous, with a constitution I could count on like a younger brother. That's when I told my mother: on the other side it's really underdeveloped. We're going back. Really, I said: I want to go back, not possible unless Mummy who is part of me comes too. We wait in the empty street at the stop for Lethe, the only bus that runs both ways. My mother is losing patience. The bus doesn't come. It's not easy to wait for a bus you've heard is the only one that runs both ways. I check the guidebook. Neither Canto XIV of the Iliad nor Canto XI of the Odyssey mentions the place. Just what you'd expect for Lethe I tell myself. Naturally forgetfulness attracts attention to itself by means of absence and omission. But for my mother the bus not turning up is the theme of her nightmares. I explain that in this country one comes along every quarter of an hour...To signal to the vehicle that one wishes to board Oblivion Return one must fan open the grille by pressing a button and lighting up the small lantern on the top of the archway, which I did. It's the one gleam of hope in this world."

"That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. The miracle into which the child and the poet walk [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there?The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says?one very small line lost in his writing?to the depths, to the depths."

"The Devil is the soul of Literature. he is its genius its wit."

"The devil, it is said, speaks evil, one speaks ill of the devil who introduces such so-called evils as separation, as auto-separation, as fending-ness, as defending."

"The more I anoint the more my mind adheres physically to the mysterious fabric of love. I am decutie. Worn thin. You know that word?"

"The natural characters in the drama are not supposed to be philosophical, nor are they people with any refined kind of knowledge. They may be particularly blind or they may be suffering from the heaviness of the law, exactly as people have been suffering for 5000 years."

"The only book that is worth writing is the one we don?t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed"

"The refugees leave a refuge, enter a refuge run to the windows, what they see makes them move on, they move, refuge means move, move moves on into madness, my book I say is on the move, we are moving each other."

"The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. The thing does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country. The writer has a foreign origin; we do not know the particular nature of these foreigners, but we feel they feel there is an appeal, that someone is calling them back."

"There is no decisive "shift" between theatre and fiction, in any case relative to an engagement, something that is on the order of a responsibility of writing."

"There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn?t-eat."

"They have always been there. I do not know them. I have never looked at them. I 'know' they are there. Their presence. Roots. Mine? My so strange roots."

"They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else."

"This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores."

"This is what?s happening: together we are descending the stairs of the heart, which lead to the sources. (It is a secret staircase. I knew it existed. Which is why I avoided it. Because it leads to the other-life, deep, underground, the fluvial, the painful.) We are in the process of descending into the depths of the heart. To where bodies communicate with each other."

"To be afraid is the condition of loving knowledge. Were I not dying of fear, I'd not know how to exist myself, I wouldn't get the notices of existence, I wouldn't record with delight the miniscule passage of a blue tit, its wing dipped in gold on the dusk. Were I not dying of sorrow I wouldn't with nostalgia be present at the creation of the world, the squirrel nuptials this morning I wouldn't care. Creatures are born to a backdrop of adieux."

"To fly/steal is woman?s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly."

"Tyrants, despots, dictators, capitalism, all that forms the visible political space for us is only the visible and theatrical, photographable projection of the Self-with-against-the-other. I suggest we add the preposition "withagainst" to the English language."

"Ultimately I think that no one can write without the aid of God, but what is it, God? without the aid of writing, God-as-Writing."

"Voice-cry. Agony--the spoken word exploded, blown to bits by suffering and anger, demolishing discourse: this is how she has always been heard before, ever since the time when masculine society began to push her offstage, expulsing her, plundering her. Ever since Medea, ever since Electra."

"We are going toward the sea. I have swollen. I am carried away. Sometimes at night love comes up so quickly and so high, and if we have no little boat perhaps it is because we want to roll breathless under the ocean floor."