Rene Char Quotes

Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds, Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks, My busy heart who shudders as she talks Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.

A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

Life songs of ages, throbbing in my blood, have danced the rhythm of the tide and flood.

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them

In the heart of man, there is a constant conflict between the flesh and the spirit.

Roar, lion of the heart, and tear me open!

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when.

Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself...I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me...Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

You are the untold story. You are the impassioned truth wanting to scream its existence, to be forever trapped by a strong hand clapped firmly over the mouth of my soul.

There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others-