The Vagabond

I want nothing from love, in short, but love.

So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.

I have found my voice again and the art of using it...

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

beautiful December grapes, blue as plums, every grape a little skinful of sweet, tasteless water

I have no equals, I have only my fellow wayfarers.

At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.

There is no doubt that, if ever my heart were to call my master Chance by another name, I should make an excellent Catholic.

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

All this is still my kingdom, a small portion of the splendid riches which God distributes to passers-by, to wanderers and to solitaries. The earth belongs to anyone who stops for a moment, gazes and goes on his way; the whole sun belongs to the naked lizard who basks in it.

To write sincerely, almost sincerely! I hope it may bring me relief, that sort of interior silence which follows a sudden utterance, a confession.

Two o’clock already! High time for a woman of letters who has turned out badly to go to sleep.

Ah! How young you are. Your hell is limited to not possessing what you desire, a thing which some people have to put up with all their lives. But to possess what one loves and every minute to feel one's sole treasure disintegrating, melting, and slipping away like gold dust between one's fingers! And not to have the dreadful courage to open one's hand and let the whole treasure go, but to clench one's fingers ever tighter, and to cry and beg to keep...what? a precious little trace of gold in the hollow of one's palm.

Rest assured that long patience and jealously concealed sorrows have shaped, refined, and hardened that woman who makes people exclaim: "She's made of steel!" She's simply "made of woman," and that's sufficient.

A woman can never die of grief. She is such a solid creature, so hard to kill!

I shall desire you as I desire in turn the fruit that hangs out of reach, the far-off water, and the blissful little house that I pass by. In each place where my desires have strayed, I leave thousands and thousands of shadows in my own shape, shed from me: one lies on the warm blue rocks of the ledges in my own country, another in the damp hollow of a sunless valley, and a third follows a bird, a sail, the wind and the wave. You keep the most enduring of them: a naked, undulating shadow, trembling with pleasure like a plant in the stream. But time will dissolve it like the others, and you will no longer know anything of me until the day when my steps finally halt and there will fly away from me a last small shadow.

When are a 'lady on your own,' in other words the landlords' abomination, outcast and terror all rolled into one, you take what you find, lodge where you may, and put up with newly plastered walls.

You can be certain that long patience, and griefs jealously hidden have tempered and sharpened and toughened this woman till everyone cries ‘She’s made of steel!’ No, she is merely made of woman.

Ich lasse an jedem Ort meiner Sehnsüchte Tausende und aber Tausende Schatten zurück, die sich nach meinem Ebenbild von mir lösen: einer auf dem heißen, blauschimmernden Gestein der Schluchten in meiner Heimat, ein anderer in der feuchten Tiefe eines Tales ohne Sonne und wieder ein anderer, der dem Vogel, dem Segel, dem Wind und den Wellen folgt. Dir aber bleibt der treueste von allen: ein nackter, wogender Schatten, den die Lust schüttelt, wie einen Grashalm im Bach...Aber die Zeit wird ihn auflösen wie alle anderen, und du wirst nichts mehr von mir wissen bis zu dem Tag, an dem mein Weg zu Ende ist und ein letzter kleiner Schatten sich von mir löst...