...You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.. Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn!

He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.

...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.

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

Unhappiness was my god.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.