Zoe

“A good meal, a good talk, a good fuck--what better way to pass the day?”
― Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

“I sought a soul that might resemble mine, and I could not find it. I scanned all the crannies of the earth: my perseverance was useless. Yet I could not remain alone. There had to be someone who would approve of my character; there had to be someone with the same ideas as myself. It was morning. The sun in all his magnificence rose on the horizon, and behold, there also appeared before my eyes a young man whose presence made flowers grow as he passed. He approached me and held out his hand: “I have come to you, you who seek me. Let us give thanks for this happy day.” But I replied: “Go! I did not summon you. I do not need your friendship… .” It was evening. Night was beginning to spread the blackness of her veil over nature. A beautiful woman whom I could scarcely discern also exerted her bewitching sway upon me and looked at me with compassion. She did not, however, dare speak to me. I said: “Come closer that I may discern your features clearly, for at this distance the starlight is not strong enough to illumine them.” Then, with modest demeanour, eyes lowered, she crossed the greensward and reached my side. I said as soon as I saw her: “I perceive that goodness and justice have dwelt in your heart: we could not live together. Now you are admiring my good looks which have bowled over more than one woman. But sooner or later you would regret having consecrated your love to me, for you do not know my soul. Not that I shall be unfaithful to you: she who devotes herself to me with so much abandon and trust — with the same trust and abandon do I devote myself to her. But get this into your head and never forget it: wolves and lambs look not on one another with gentle eyes.” What then did I need, I who rejected with disgust what was most beautiful in humanity!”
― Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and the Complete Works

“The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“People despair of love stupidly – I have despaired of it myself — they live in servitude to this idea that love is always behind them, never before them: bygone years, lies about forgetting after twenty years. They can bear to admit – and force themselves to – that love is not for them, with its procession of clarities, with this look it casts upon the world from all the eyes of diviners. They are limping with fallacious memories, for which they even invent the origin of an immemorial fall, so as not to find themselves too guilty. And yet for each, the promise of each coming hour contains life's whole life secret, perhaps about to be revealed one day, possibly in another being.”
― André Breton, Mad Love