Quotes from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Love...no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist.

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“What an old maid I'm getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“ONCE, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“I

On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily;
Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils...
- In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.

For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia
Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.
For more than a thousand years her sweet madness
Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath
Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;
The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,
The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.

The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;
At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,
Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;
- A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.

II

O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!
- It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway
That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.

It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,
Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;
It was your heart listening to the song of Nature
In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;

It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,
That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft;
It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman
Who one April morning sate mute at your knees!

Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl!
You melted to him as snow does to a fire;
Your great visions strangled your words
- And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye!

III

- And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe the fatherland. The thing for me is a very drunken sleep on the beach.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Hire myself out to whom? What beast must I worship? What sacred images should I destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lies am I supposed to believe? March through whose blood?”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Weakness or strength: there you are, strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

In cities, suddenly, the mud seemed red and black like a mirror when the lamp moves about in the adjoining room, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; to the right, to the left all the riches of the world flaming like a billion thunder-bolts.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“The white men are landing. Cannons! Now we must be baptized, get dressed, and go to work. My heart has been stabbed by grace. Ah! I hadn't thought this would happen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“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.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,--the viaticum,—there are medicine and philosophy,—old wives' remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry!...

Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?

It is the vision of numbers. We are going toward the Spirit. There’s no doubt about it, an oracle, I tell you. I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“A storm came chasing the sky away. And virgin sands
Drank all the water of the evening woods,
God's wind blew icicles into the ponds;
As I wept I saw gold,- and could not drink.

- Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“I shall ask forgiveness for having fed on lies.

- Farewell”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“I am not a prisoner of my reason.

- Bad Blood”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“O may it come, the time of love,
The time we'd be enamoured of.

- Song of the Highest Tower”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

About the author

Popular quotes

“How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from The Memory of Earth

“On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter "Z" constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter "Z" should be utterly excised--fully extirpated--absolutively heave-ho'ed from our communal vocabulary!”
― Mark Dunn, quote from Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

“For a moment they all looked at Dermot incredulously, as if he'd just announced he was going to birth a kangaroo.”
― Charlaine Harris, quote from Deadlocked

“A man cannot eat more than three meals a day, or live in more than one house at a time. If you have what you need, and more than you need, what is the use of adding to it?”
― Alison Croggon, quote from The Crow

“I’ve got a lot of wishes about it, but you know what they say. ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.’”

“I’ve never heard that before in my life, and I’m not sure I even know what it means.”

“It means that you could spit in one hand and wish in the other, and we all know which hand’ll fill up quicker.”
― Cherie Priest, quote from Boneshaker

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.