A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. - Stéphane Mallarmé

Will new and alive the beautiful today Shatter with a blow of drunken wing This hard lake, forgotten, haunted under rime By the transparent glacier, flights unflown! A swan of long ago remembers now that he, Magnificent but lost to hope, is doomed For having failed to sing the realms of life When the ennui of sterile winter gleamed.

It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contemplation of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three quarters of a poem's enjoyment-which is derived from unraveling it gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream. Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood; or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by a series of decipherings.)

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.