The voices / 35 fragments

André Breton

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Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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01Undated

My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.

André Breton / quote

02Undated

Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.

André Breton / quote

03Undated

Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d’histoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux à qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu’avec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme

André Breton / quote

04Undated

We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.

André Breton / quote

05Undated

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

André Breton / quote

06Undated

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

André Breton / quote

07Undated

Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?

André Breton / quote

08Undated

Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.

André Breton / quote

09Undated

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

André Breton / quote

10Undated

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

André Breton / quote

11Undated

I am the soul in limbo.

André Breton / quote

12Undated

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

André Breton / quote

13Undated

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

André Breton / quote

14Undated

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

André Breton / quote

15Undated

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

André Breton / quote

16Undated

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

André Breton / quote

17Undated

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

André Breton / quote

18Undated

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

André Breton / quote

19Undated

The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.

André Breton / quote

20Undated

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

André Breton / quote

21Undated

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

André Breton / quote

22Undated

A word and everything is saved.A word and all is lost.

André Breton / quote

23Undated

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

André Breton / quote

24Undated

I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.

André Breton / quote