The flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read all the books.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
A roll of the dice will never abolish chance.
Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.
The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.
Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses [...] of all rhythms. But in truth there is no prose: there is the alphabet, and then verses more or less tight, more or less diffuse.
It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself.
Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.
You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.
To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.
The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.
The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.
I go to see the shadow you have become.
The world exists to end up in a book.
The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though he was full of ideas. My dear Degas, Mallarmé responded, poems are not made out of ideas. They're made out of words.
In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.
Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.
For we are always at one with the instrument of our magic spells.
