Quotes About Rimbaud

I learned a lot from Arthur Rimbaud. People talk about how he wanted to be a seer and do that through the derangement of the senses. What they forget was that he also advocated, sternly and austerely, that one must be able to go through all that - and then articulate it.

Un artista es alguien que puede iluminar una habitación oscura. Yo nunca voy a encontrar la diferencia entre el pase de Pelé a Carlos Alberto en la final de 1970 y la poesía de Rimbaud.

Some artists attain to the cosmos of the spirit only by a practice of violence. They are artists who know hell and speak of it familiarly: Dante, Dostoievsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Henry Miler and Jim Morrison. The vocabulary used by these men opens up their passage through the flames. This is the violence of the spirit (not that of passion) in which the artist becomes the accuser of a wayward society.

The flights of Rimbaud are comparable to the ceaseless wanderings of the clown from village to village, and like the frantic gestures and somersaults of their performances.

When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

It is true what Rimbaud said; If you think a book is strong enough, try it at the ocean, in the wind, at the waves. If the book can resist the ocean, then it exists. Otherwise, throw it away.

Great idea on the arrangement of my work. It will make a difference to me to disentangle certain passages, bring certain phrases in relief, help me to find my own bearings. The literalness is not to be attributed to the high and noble reasons I gave you (all that stuff on Rimbaud, metaphysical-artistic imperatives), just sheer laziness, between you and me.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Aucun des sophismes de la folie, - la folie qu'on enferme, - n'a été oublié par moi : je pourrais les redire tous, je tiens le système.

I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride, – and a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!

So much the worse for the wood if it finds that it has become a violin, and I feel nothing but contempt for those ignoramuses who argue over things that they know nothing about.

Perpetua farsa! Mi inocencia podría hacerme llorar. La vida es la farsa en que participamos todos.

Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb, which will answer our prayers [...] it takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. But when Rimbaud walked out the back door, doom had already announced itself.

The role of Rimbaud is one of the most important roles to play for a young actor.

I say, indeed: consolation in the nonsentience of nature. For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; it is the sea gone off with the sun (Rimbaud).

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

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.

At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked.

Along with "mon hysterie" I cultivated a "rotten, ripe maturity." You understand what I mean: like Rimbaud, I practiced having hallucinations.