Quotes from Arthur Rimbaud

Unhappiness was my god.

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.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

What am I doing here?

You will always be a hyena.

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soliel amer: L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer!

But, true, I've wept too much! Dawns break hearts./ Every moon is brutal, every sun bitter.

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.

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

It is found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea Gone with the sun.

I could never throw Love out of the window.

And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures

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.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Mais vrai, j'ai trop pleuré. Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer: L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. O que ma quille éclate! O que j'aille à la mer!

The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.

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

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien : Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme, Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien, Par la Nature, -- heureux comme avec une femme.

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.