LOUIS ARAGON QUOTES
French poet, novelist & editor (1897-1982)
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
Your heart like a hawk-mouth in the sun, your heart like a ship on an atoll, your heart like a compass needle driven mad by a little piece of lead, like washing drying in the wind, like a whining of horses, like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
Everything that is not me is incomprehensible.
LOUIS ARAGON
The Adventures of Telemachus
In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
40 months of blossoming, months of transfiguration,
May without cloud and June stabbed to the heart,
I shall not ever forget the lilacs or the roses
Nor those the spring has kept folded away apart.
LOUIS ARAGON
"Les Lilas et les roses", Le Creve-Coeur
The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
Language was not given to man: he seized it.
LOUIS ARAGON
Le Libertinage
It is time to return to close reading, to a serious and painstaking examination of an author's methods, of his style. Do not be deterred by headaches. First of all, this would be proof of your lack of stamina. And then, migraines, piercing pain and sudden stabs at the temples are more likely the effects of syphilis than of hard work.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
The carnal contact side by side, from heel to armpit, brings shudders that shake up nature like the flights of nocturnal birds.
LOUIS ARAGON
The Adventures of Telemachus
The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.
LOUIS ARAGON
La Roman Inacheve
O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
I shall always rebel against any attempt to reduce a human being to a kind of mannequin, whose deeds and questions would be comprehensible like the deeds and gestures of monarchs recorded day after day in official communiques. Six months of a life cannot catalogue the vitality, the activity of an individual; only death stops development and then, what is important is the overall meaning of a life, not the details of that life, edifying to some, scandalous to others.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.
LOUIS ARAGON
Paris Peasant
No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.
LOUIS ARAGON
"Manifesto of the Dada Movement", Feb. 5, 1920
Most people have never known solitude.... But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.
LOUIS ARAGON
Passengers of Destiny
I have no friends, there are only people I love.
LOUIS ARAGON
response to Proust Questionaire, Livres de France, Jan. 1961