Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance! - Charles Baudelaire

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.