I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.

I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.

The earth is suffocating... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive.

I tell my piano the things I used to tell you

It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place.

The three most celebrated doctors on the island have been to see me. One sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I was dying and the third that I'm going to die.

I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me.