I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

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

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

...these poets here, you see, they are not of this world:let them live their strange life; let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love and sing: they are as rich as Jacques Coeur, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry: Let them live: God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures

A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.