Auguste Rodin

« I can’t take it anymore, I can’t go a day without seeing you. Otherwise the atrocious madness […] All my soul belongs to you […] may my heart still feel your divine love spreading again. »(Letter from Auguste Rodin to Camille Claudel)

Roman Opałka

« I wanted to show time, its change in duration, the one that nature shows, but in a way specific to man, a subject conscious of its presence defined by death: emotion of life in irreversible duration. Arbitrary time of calendars, of clocks does not interest me. It erases itself by the repetition that defines it, only focalization of the present. » (Roman Opalka)

Rainer Maria Rilke

« How to hold my soul, so
that it does not touch yours?
How stretch it high above you towards other things?
I would so much like to lodge it somewhere, near of something lost in the shadows, in a strange, quiet place, which don’t continue to vibrate when your bass vibrates.
But everything that touches us, you and me, unites us like a bow that pulls two strings one voice.
On what instrument are we stretched?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
O sweet song. »
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Marguerite Duras

« His body had become mine, I couldn’t make out any more. I had become the living negation of reason. And all the reasons that could have been opposed to this lack of reason, I would have swept them away, and how, like houses of cards, and like, precisely, purely imaginary reasons…I no longer had a homeland but love itself. » (Marguerite Duras)

Leonard Cohen

« Well I stepped into an avalanche
It covered up my soul
When I am not this hunchback that you see
I sleep beneath the golden hills
You who wish to conquer pain
You must learn, learn to serve me well
You strike my side by accident
As you go down for your gold
The crippled h i that you clothe and feed
Is neither starved nor cold
He does not ask for your company
Not at the centre, the centre of the world
When I am on a pedestal
You did not raise me there
Your laws do not compel me
To kneel grotesque and bare
I myself am the piedestal
For this ugly hump at which you stare
You who wish to conquer pain
You must learn what makes me kind
The crumbs of love that you offer me
They’re the crumbs I’ve left behind
Your pain is no credential here
It’s just the shadow, shadow of my wound
I have begun to long for you
I who have no greed
I have begun to ask for you
I who have no need
You say you’ve gone away from me
But I can feel you when you breathe
Do not dress in those rags for me
I know you are not poor
You don’t love me quite so fiercely now
When you know that you are not sure
It is your turn, beloved
It is your flesh that I wear. « 

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another.”
(Anaïs Nin)

Jean Cocteau

« La minute m’a dit : « Presse-moi dans ta main ;
Tu ne sais aujourd’hui si tu seras demain ;
Ainsi prends tout le suc qui m’enfle comme une outre,
Ne tourne pas la tête et ne passe pas outre,
Vis-moi !…dans un instant, je serai du passé !
Mais tu ne sais peut-être au juste ce que c’est
Qu’étreindre dans ses bras la minute qui passe,
Si tu comprends la splendeur grave de l’espace
Qui te laissait jadis indifférent et froid,
Si tu sais accepter la douleur sans effroi,
Si tu sais jouir d’un très subtil parfum de rose,
Si pour toi le couchant est une apothéose,
Si tu pleures d’amour, si tu sais voir le beau
Alors suis sans trembler la route du tombeau.
Tu vivras de chansons, de splendeurs, de murmures,
Le chemin n’est plus long si l’on cueille ses mûres,
Et je suis près de toi la mûre du chemin ! »
La minute m’a dit : « Presse-moi dans ta main. »

(Jean Cocteau)

E.E. Cummings

« Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart I carry it in my heart. « 
(E.E. Cummings)

William Shakespeare

« My eyes see best when they are closed. All day they observe only futile things, but when I sleep, it is you they contemplate in their dreams, and, piercing their darkness, pierce the night towards you. »
(William Shakespeare)

Anaïs Nin

“The sun shines on the duality of day and night, and on eternal love. That which dies in modern man because he is like a potted plant on a balcony, never dies in me because my soul reaches to the other side of the earth, and my roots are infinite.” (Anais Nin)

The snake woman of Nara from the Kaikidan Ekotoba Scroll around 1850

“The sun shines on the duality of day and night, and on eternal love. That which dies in modern man because he is like a potted plant on a balcony, never dies in me because my soul reaches to the other side of the earth, and my roots are infinite.” (Anais Nin)

Arthur Rackham

« Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer ;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher. » (L’albatros, Charles Baudelaire)

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939)

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud.  “La coquille et le clergyman” 1928. Photographie de plateau. Collection Paule Thévenin. Scan personnel de la revue Obliques numéros 10-11, 1976
Plus sur le film ici: http://www.arte.tv/fr/
la-coquille-et-le-clergyman/892138,CmC=892144.html