Tropic Of Cancer Quotes
"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead."
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."
"This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word."
"To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music."
"The world is a cancer eating itself away… I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere music will at last triumph."
"Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously. And in this beautiful Villa Borghese there is scarcely ever any evidence of food."
"The only writers about me for whom I have any respect, at present, are Carl and Boris. They are possessed. They glow inwardly with a white flame. They are mad and tone deaf."
"It is a beautiful woman who has come to look at the apartment. An American, of course."
"We are living a million lives in the space of a generation."
"There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books."
"Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict."
"On Sundays there's a fever in the streets. Nothing like it anywhere, except perhaps on the East Side, or down around Chatham Square."
"I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine."
"I have health, good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal."
"In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot."
"I'm healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd'hui!"
"A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything."
"I have simplified everything. If there are any new problems I can carry them in my rucksack, along with my dirty wash."
"As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me."
"By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all."
"If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away."
"The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts."
"On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama."
"Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions."
"I suppose I would never have gotten out of Nanantatee's clutches if fate hadn't intervened."
"I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further."
"It was as if he had taken out that circumcised dick of his and was peeing on us."
"If I am a hyena, I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself."
"The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing."
"The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers."
"At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room."
"That's just it... it didn't end. I promised to see her Tuesday around five o'clock. That's bad, you know!"
"Putting on his pants a button falls off. 'Look at that will you. It's falling apart, the goddamned suit.'"
"But she must have had some attractiveness... you were kissing her breasts, you said."
"My hair's falling out too... and I ought to see the dentist."
"The following day, at one-thirty, I call on Van Norden. It's his day off, or rather his night off."
"That guy's an artist. He described every detail minutely."
"I'm against hotels like that. I told her so."
"But listen, all that's beside the point. What I'm getting at is the way he tells it to me."
"What happened between us – at any rate, as far as I go – is that you touched me, touched my life, that is, at the one point where I am still alive: my death."
"That may be the reason why I am so afraid to see you: you may have played the trick on me, and died. Things happen so fast nowadays."
"Nothing is happening that I can see, except the usual calamities on the front page."
"The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that evening at the Cronstadts', when Moldorf became God, was that I was very close to you then."
"It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately."
"The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamor of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them."
"One can live in Paris – I discovered that! – on just grief and anguish."
"Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked."
"The little Place, so charming and tranquil at twilight, could assume the most dismal, sinister character when darkness came on."
"A sham battle. A lot of tin soldiers who hadn't the least interest in learning how to kill or how to polish their boots or currycomb the horses."
"When the sun comes out, any spot in Paris can look beautiful."
"The principal thing was to keep the adjectives well furbished."
"What a horrid beard! I think you people must be crazy around here."
"She's a princess," he says, smacking his lips as if he had just tasted some rare caviar.
"Stop following me like that!" she exclaimed. "And haven't you anything to drink but this?"
"I must get drunk tonight, I have told you that already."
"You're a pig!" she yelled. "But you're a nice boy too."
"Roaming around the quadrangle with an empty belly most of the time I got to feel slightly mad."
"Astonishing how little firewood you could pick up in the streets of Dijon."
"The whole town looked a bit crazy when the blue of evening settled over it."
"Around the interior courts were ranged the classrooms, little shacks where the pedagogues gave free rein to their voices."
"On the blackboard the futile abracadabra which the future citizens of the republic would have to spend their lives forgetting."
"Always this bending process, this landscape gardening to make the mind more attractive."
"The night hung close, dagger-pointed, drunk as a maniac."
"I hear the learning chaffed and chuzzled, the figures mounting upward, bat slime dripping aloft."
"The earth in its dark corridors knows my step, feels a foot abroad, a wing stirring."
"The cold north wind pointed with barbed shafts, icy, malevolent, greedy, blighting, paralyzing."
"The seasons are come to a stagnant stop, the trees blench and wither."
"A walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of this slaughterhouse geometry."
"Everything descends in volcanic chutes. Yonder, in the barren hills, rolling onward."
"The silence descends in volcanic chutes. Yonder, in the barren hills, rolling onward toward the great metallurgical regions."
"I'm like a herd of wild horses with blinders over our eyes. On the rampage. Stampede. Over the precipice."