Quotes from Andre Breton

Puis, soudain, se plaçant devant moi, m'arrêtant presque, avec cette manière extraordinaire de m'appeler, comme on appellerait quelqu'un, de salle en salle, dans un château vide: "André? André?... Tu écriras un roman sur moi. Je t'assure. Ne dis pas non. Prends garde, tout s'affaiblit, tout disparait. De nous il faut que quelque chose reste...""-Nadja

We have said nothing about Chirico until we take into account his most personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool.

Aux yeux de niveau d'eau de niveau d'air de terre et de feu.

Le plus beau présent de la vie est la liberté qu'elle vous laisse d'en sortir à votre heure.

Hugo est surréaliste quand il n'est pas bête.

Creo solamente que entre mi pensamiento, tal como se desprende de lo que ha podido leerse firmado por mí, y yo mismo, a quien la verdadera naturaleza de mi pensamiento enrola en algo que todavía ignoro, hay un mundo, un mundo irrevocable de fantasmas, de hipótesis que se realizan, de apuestas perdidas y de mentiras, cosas todas que, tras un rápido examen, me disuaden de aportar la más mínima correción a esta obra.

Isegi kui olen üritanud midagi hingega teha, olen ma enam kui kindel, et ei vääri elu sellisena, nagu ma teda armastan ja nagu ta end pakub: elu, mis võtab hingetuks.

The street, which I believed could offer my life its surprising detours, the street with its uneasiness and its glances, was my true element; there as nowhere else I caught the breath of the possible.

Respectfully I kiss her lovely teeth and she says, slowly, gravely, the second time a few notes higher than the first: 'Communion takes place in silence...Communion takes place in silence.' This, she explains, is because this kiss leaves her with the impression of something sacred, where her teeth 'substituted for the host.

Then suddenly, standing in front of me, virtually stopping me, with that extraordinary way she had of calling me, the way you might call someone from room to room in an empty castle: 'André? André?...You will write a novel about me. I'm sure you will. Don't say you won't. Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us...

Perhaps] I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I've forgotten.

She uses a new image to make me understand how she lives: it's like the morning when she bathes and her body withdraws while she stares at the surface of the bath water. 'I am the thought on the bath in the room without mirrors.

Desde el primero hasta el último día, tuve a Nadja por un genio libre, algo así como uno de esos espíritus etéreos a los que determinadas prácticas de magia permiten atraerse momentáneamente, pero que de ninguna manera podrían ser sometidos.

Time is a tease. Time is a tease–because everything has to happen in its own time.

I knew everything, so hard have I tried to read in my streams of tears.

Whatever desire or even illusion I may have had to the contrary, perhaps I have not been adequate to what she offered me. But what was she offering me? It does not matter. Only love in the sense I understand it–mysterious, improbable, unique, bewildering, and certain love that can only be foolproof , might have permitted the fulfillment of a miracle.

Surely this is no more unreasonable than asking some saint or divinity what one should do.

Who goes there? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?

May the great living and echoing unconsciousness which inspires my only conclusive acts in any sense I always believe in, dispose forever of all that is myself. I gladly renounce any possibility of taking back what here, again, I bestow upon it. Once more I want to recognize and rely on it alone and virtually at my leisure wander along its immense piers, staring at some shining dot I know is in my own eye and which saves me all collision with its night fright.

Indépendamment de ce qui arrive, n'arrive pas, c'est l'attente qui est magnifique.

All I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because nothing can be substituted for you, and because for me it was for all eternity that this succession of terrible or charming enigmas was to come to an end at your feet. You are not an enigma for me. I say that you have turned me from enigmas forever.

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt". I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.

I see beauty as I have seen you. As I have seen what, at the given hour and for a given time which I hope and with all my soul believe may recur, granted you to me. Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left.

La plus grande faiblesse de la pensée contemporaine me paraît résider dans la surestimation extravagante du connu par rapport à ce qui reste à connaître.