What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!

To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster