I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

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

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

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window. All they have left is cold disdain; that's what marriages live on nowadays. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log.

It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.

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.