Renée Vivien > Quotes

“I have loved to the limit of my strength. No one has a right to ask more of any human being.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“I am a mediocre being, a bit cunning.”
― Renée Vivien

“She embodies all the melancholy of autumn. She has learned to cherish with mournful tenderness a past she dares not remember.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“You yourself are the bizarre flower of some unknown dream.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“She smiled at me, and I felt a sudden burning tenderness for this creature so like fruit and roses. I desired her like blue water at dawn.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“I’ll adore you, as a drowned person does the sea.”
― Renée Vivien

“My brunette with the golden eyes, your ivory body, your amber
Has left bright reflections in the room
Above the garden.

The clear midnight sky, under my closed lids,
Still shines… I am drunk from so many roses
Redder than wine.

Leaving their garden, the roses have followed me…
I drink their brief breath, I breathe their life.
All of them are here.

It’s a miracle… The stars have risen,
Hastily, across the wide windows
Where the melted gold pours.

Now, among the roses and the stars,
You, here in my room, loosening your robe,
And your nakedness glistens

Your unspeakable gaze rests on my eyes…
Without stars and without flowers, I dream the impossible
In the cold night.”
― Renée Vivien

“Je sentis frissonner sur mes lèvres muettes la douceur et l'effroi de ton premier baiser. Sous tes pas, j'entendis les lyres se briser, en criant vers le ciel l'ennui fier des poètes, parmi des flots de sons languissamment décrus.”
― Renée Vivien, Poems De Renee Vivien

“Les mots ne sont rien en pareil cas, — l’art de les prononcer est tout…”
― Renée Vivien, The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories

“I adore fairy stories. And I still have the wistful spirit of a child that listens wide-eyed to the marvellous tales told over and over during long winter evenings.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“What matters to us, the judgment of men? What have we to doubt, since we are pure before life?”
― Renée Vivien

“Friendship is more dangerous than love, since its roots are stronger and go deeper than the roots of love. The anguish of friendship is more bitter than the anguish of love. Certain souls love friendship as others love love; they suffer through friendship as others through love, They have in their lives only one friendship as others have but a single love. It is when they lose friendship that they despair hopelessly.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“Friendship is more dangerous than love, since its roots are stronger and go deeper than the roots of love. The anguish of friendship is more bitter than the anguish of love. Certain souls love friendship as others love love; they suffer through friendship as others through love. They have in their lives only one friendship as others have but a single love. It is when they lose friendship that they despair hopelessly.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“One always loves badly [...] To love well is to no longer be in love.”
― Renée Vivien

“For happiness is like the magnificence of ruins”
― Renée Vivien, Une femme m'apparut...

“I’m infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret.”
― Renée Vivien

“I venerate / the Woman whom I fear, the Wildness that I love.”
― Renée Vivien

“You will never know how to tarnish the devotion
Of my passion for the beauty of women, that my verse
acclaims”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“I love your carnal lips lingering
Still creased by kisses from before.”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“I believe that the Unutterable and the Incomprehensible are two faces of a double idea, a hermaphrodite idea. Everything that is ugly, unjust, fierce, base, emanates from the Male Principle.
Everything unbearably lovely and desirable emanates from the Female Principle. The two principles are equally powerful and hate one another incurably. In the end, one will exterminate the other, but which will be the
final victor? That riddle is the perpetual anguish of all souls. We hope in
silence for the decisive triumph of the Female Principle, the Good and the
Beautiful, over the Male, that is, over Bestial Force and Cruelty.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“All is white where the moon pours her shower.
At her feet groans the tormented sea.
Serene, she sees solitude flower
In the night, and chastity.”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“I love sunset, the day dying bit by bit.
The fire, the monastic intimacy of a room
Where the lamps with veiled amber transparence
Redden the old bronze and blue the stoneware.”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“in its velvet keep
Earth holds you; on your forehead violets weep.”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“I listen, dreaming. Your refreshing voice
Runs like the water of a spring over moss”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“My troubles have so abruptly overcome me.
Time has woven itself… And here I am barefooted”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“I smile at all who weep and I weep before those who smile.”
― Renée Vivien

“How should I receive her when she appeared? I would say nothing, I would walk toward her and stare into the depths of her eyes at her cruel blonde soul. She would be overcome by my silence and my calm. Then, coldly, resolutely, I would strangle her. That would be ugly, brutal, savage, but it would be a brief nightmare, and in the joy of the mystic murder, I would stretch her out on the divan covered in the green of a mossy bank. I would spread about her head the halo of her pale hair. I would fill her hands with white lilies and scatter her body with her favorite roses-white with a tinge of green. She would slumber, only a bit more pale than in her regular sleep. And I would love her in that superhuman hour more than any other being had ever dared to love. That would be madness with its exaltations and its terrors and its aftermath. I would watch beside her until dawn. I would see the taper-flames waver. The deep blue of midnight would fill the corners with shadow. Vally's lids would grow strangely blue. And I would shout aloud as a man does when drunk: I have killed her! Then she would remain forever my virgin Priestess. She would be the pure whiteness of my dreams, the Inaccessible, the Untarnishable. I would have saved her in saving myself.”
― Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me

“Toute la poésie cachée qui était en moi s'est réveillée, dans la chaude lumière de ce radieux paysage, je sentais une émotion inconnue m'agiter, c'était le papillon de l'âme qui s'éveillait au fond de sa chrysalide et qui sentait palpiter ses ailes.”
― Renée Vivien

“oh wind of the enormous sea
Whose sharp odor of salt revives the force in me,
Oh wind of the wide sea, carry sorrows away.”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems

“My giddy soul is all perfumed
Of your flesh and white roses.”
― Renée Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems