Last Words from Montmartre Quotes

“Tarkovsky was right. The responsibility of the artist is to stir people’s hearts and minds toward loving others: to find the light and the true beauty of human nature within this love. Religion can rarely show us what fate means in concrete terms. Yet everyone needs to be understood and this understanding is found within each individual’s fate, one’s life journey that clarifies the way. I’m not a therapist or a philosopher or a priest. I’m an artist.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Loyalty is not a passive, negative guardianship of the gate-- loyalty arises from the complete & utter opening & subsequent blazing forth of one's inner life. It is an active, determined desire that demands total self-awareness & deliberate engagement.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Life has suddenly become overcrowded. Too many people I can care for are swarming in and filling up my chest. Too many things I want to do are rushing headlong into my new life for reasons unknown to me. All of a sudden my new life is like a field overgrown with strange flowers and exotic grasses or the shimmering, starry sky of my unbridled imagination...”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Love is not merely need alone, & what is more important is loving you, & making my true nature comprehensible to you.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one's own in relation to those of the other.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“It’s easy for the body to be open to desiring different people because desire wells up and demands to be satisfied. It’s easy to categorize corporeal desire as sexuality, but if it has no means of merging with spiritual desire, then a rupture will occur between spirit and flesh. For ultimately passion and sex aren’t only expressed physically but through a true union between two spirits.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Suicide. This is the exact opposite of last time, for this time I'm experiencing a kind of pleasure in life, in being alive, a pleasure in living that I've never experienced before, and I'm hopeful and confident that I can become someone with dignity. I know now why I couldn't change certain characteristics and certain things about myself, but it's not a problem anymore. Certain pathways I failed to open in the past have now opened. My whole self is radiating light. I see with clarity. I understand the cause and effect of the last year. What I had imagined I've now attained. It's as if I can see my life right in front of my eyes, and all I have to do is reach out and draw it in... Now I don't feel the acute pain I felt before; I feel enlightened, at peace. It's as if I've instantly found the secret of "Suffering", how to bear it and how to endure it... Yes, this time I've decided to kill myself not because I can't live with suffering and not because I don't enjoy being alive. I love life passionately, and my wish to die is a wish to live...

Yes, I've chosen suicide. The endpoint of this process of "Forgiveness". Not to punish anyone or to protest a wrong. I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people... I take complete responsibility for my life, and even if my physical body disappears upon death, I don't believe my spirit will disappear. As long as I have loved people fully, then I can be content fading into "Nothingness". If I'm using death to express my passion for life, then I still don't love her enough, don't love life enough. and I will reincarnate in a different form to love her and to be part of her life... So the death of my flesh really doesn't mean anything. Doesn't solve anything.

Is this a tragedy? Will there be tragedy?”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I don't know when you'll make the final, lethal cut, but before that happens I will cling to you and sing with all my heart.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“The whole of March 18 was so poetically and emotionally satisfying that I went a little wild.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“With sincerity, courage, & honesty, one can face death, extreme physical pain, & even extreme psychological pain. One can resist persecution from individuals, society, or government. To live in preparation of adversity & finding ways to preserve your core values --this is what it means to learn "how to live.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Only a spirit of artistic sincerity can console the souls of humankind.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I have to live by transforming into someone else.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“And on it flows. I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die ... and when I'm dead for my body to be consumed by birds and beasts, leaving only the bone of my brow for Xu ... like Alexander, loyal to an everlasting love.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Why bother writing to someone who doesn’t deserve your love?

Maybe it has nothing to do with the other person but is for my own love.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Want you to gnaw me to pieces / Want you to eat up my rational brain”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Want to make fierce love with you
Want you to gnaw me to pieces
Want you to eat up my rational brain”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I wanted to board the plane with you, to show our boarding passes to the flight attendant together, sit side by side and talk until I put my head on your shoulder as you read and slept, and then wake up to together and listen to music, watch a movie, go to the bathroom… Maybe we’d fall asleep again then wake up to another meal only slightly more appetising than the first and watch the shifting cloud formations outside the window together, and hear the captain announcing that we were about to land in Hong Kong, about to land in Malaysia, about to land in Paris…

Do I think too much? All I really want is to fly with you.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I envy you. I envy that you are loved completely by a beautiful soul, and that this love can still grow, still adapt, that it can recover from catastrophe, still vital and capable of giving birth to new things.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I’ve burned completely, I’ve already bloomed fully.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“For dead little bunny, and myself, soon dead”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“She isn’t aware that her spirit is precisely what I need.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Passion. It's not a male body's, & it's not a female body's It's not the penetration or reception of sex organs, & it's not how powerful a body is or the amount of its sexual secretions. It's not how a person expresses their strengths or weaknesses to other people. Passion is a quality, a quality that is an energy resource that someone can tap into within themselves. The type of passion I've been searching for in people is similar to my own. It's not necessarily in the body of a woman.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Sister, for years other people have been hurting me, and I can't take it anymore. My spirit is decaying. Sister, sister, I'm so lonely. I've done my best to live as others want me to, but this time it's serious.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“It’s easy to categorize corporeal desire as sexuality, but if it has no means of merging with spiritual desire, then a rupture will occur between spirit and flesh”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“自己經受著的，看著他人的，都是長久且不斷歷經風吹雨打的愛情，這才是我要支撐、才是我不計一切代價要去給予・付出・灌溉的。禁得起考驗的才算是真愛，我渴望著褪去風霜還能手牽手站在一起的兩個人；我渴望著不斷不斷付出而又經受著歲月的淘洗・琢磨而還活著的愛。”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“It’s simple: I can’t show my true self to people because I am “other” to them, and this agony warps me. “Otherness” prevents society from accepting your true self so that you are powerless to be your true self.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Yes, it takes courage to be straightforward and risk facing emotional pain, but evasion, pretense, and subterfuge are even more harmful to the essence of human nature; no one can bear it. It’s an elemental truth. There’s nothing complicated about it, no profound principle, so there’s no reason for “I don’t know,” “I can’t help it,” “Everything’s in chaos,” or “I need some time to figure it out.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I believe that two individuals always share a basic human bond. The depths of this bond depend on an unspoken agreement or oath between the two. The more stable their inner life and personality, the more honestly they can thrive within this genuine unspoken agreement. When there is too little of this kind of consistency, they will continually wrong others, either by creating chaos in their inner life, or by leaving themselves no choice but to close off their own soul from the rest of the world.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I can’t stand the thought of you walking in the desert. I want to give you a little patch of solid ground to stand on, or at the very least some small green oasis you can look at in the distance, to keep you from drifting away from reality, from escaping back into your mind. It’s all my fault! I missed my chance. But let me see if—using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone—I can build you a center.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Pourtant, même si la floraison n’a duré qu’un instant, j’en ai connu le plein épanouissement, et il me reste maintenant à affronter la responsabilité de donner un sens à ces deux amours infirmes, ce pour quoi je suis encore en vie...

(p. 26)”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre