“On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that’s why it’s false. But it’s damned satisfying. In life, you’re constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.” — Simone de Beauvoir “The Mandarins”
“Twenty years. No more aging, no more days. I’ll go to sleep. I’ll wake up… alone. Ten years, twenty years. I wasn’t indulgent. But I know I still loved you. I wasn’t thinking only of myself. I’ll be old from now on. (Looks down at the photograph of them) But we’re together here. Together again, somewhere. You see, they can’t keep us apart.” — Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
My dreams, they gotta catch me, ‘cause I don’t get sleep.
Your head, your hair, your every way
Are scenic as the countryside;
the smile plays in your lips and eyes
Like fresh winds on a cloudless day.
The gloomy drudge, brushed by your charms,
Is dazzled by the vibrancy
That flashes forth so brilliantly
Out of your shoulders and your arms.
All vivid colors, and the way
They resonate in how you dress
Have poets in their idleness
Imagining a flower ballet.
These lavish robes are emblems of
The mad profusion that is you;
Madwoman, I am maddened too,
And hate you even as I love!
Sometimes within a park, at rest,
Where I have dragged my apathy,
I have felt like an irony
The sunshine lacerate my breast.
And then the spring’s luxuriance
Humiliated so my heart
That I had pulled a flower apart
To punish nature’s insolence.
So I would wish, when you’re asleep,
The time for sensuality,
Towards your body’s treasury
Silently, stealthily to creep,
To bruise your ever-tender breast,
And carve in your astonished side
An injury both deep and wide,
To chastise your too-joyous flesh.
And, sweetness that would dizzy me!
In these two lips so red and new
My sister, I have made for you,
To slip my venom, lovingly!
Charles Baudelaire