LOUIS ARAGON QUOTES

French poet, novelist & editor (1897-1982)

Louis Aragon quote

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

Tags: writing


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

Tags: ideas


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

Tags: books


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

Tags: poetry


Language was not given to man: he seized it.

LOUIS ARAGON

Le Libertinage

Tags: language


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

Tags: criticism


We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

LOUIS ARAGON

Treatise on Style

Tags: genius


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

Tags: fantasy


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

Tags: sex


The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.

LOUIS ARAGON

La Roman Inacheve

Tags: roses


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


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


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

Tags: mistakes


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


I have no friends, there are only people I love.

LOUIS ARAGON

response to Proust Questionaire, Livres de France, Jan. 1961

Tags: friends


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

Tags: solitude