I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?

And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

A fate is not a punishment.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.