The voices / 45 fragments

Jean Cocteau

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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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Archive entries

01Undated

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

Jean Cocteau / quote

02Undated

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Jean Cocteau / quote

03Undated

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

Jean Cocteau / quote

04Undated

A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

Jean Cocteau / quote

05Undated

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Jean Cocteau / quote

06Undated

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

Jean Cocteau / quote

07Undated

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

Jean Cocteau / quote

08Undated

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Jean Cocteau / quote

09Undated

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.

Jean Cocteau / quote

10Undated

Art is science made clear.

Jean Cocteau / quote

11Undated

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Jean Cocteau / quote

12Undated

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Jean Cocteau / quote

13Undated

Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.

Jean Cocteau / quote

14Undated

I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.

Jean Cocteau / quote

15Undated

plantitIt will sproutBut forget about the rustic festivitiesFor the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal throughthe compact generations

Jean Cocteau / quote

16Undated

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Jean Cocteau / quote

17Undated

Be yourself. The world worships the original.

Jean Cocteau / quote

18Undated

At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

Jean Cocteau / quote

19Undated

To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

Jean Cocteau / quote

20Undated

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.

Jean Cocteau / quote

21Undated

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

Jean Cocteau / quote

22Undated

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

Jean Cocteau / quote

23Undated

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Jean Cocteau / quote

24Undated

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Jean Cocteau / quote