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“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Selected Poems and Letters

“I'm intact, and I don't give a damn.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.”
― Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

“What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.”
― Terry Eagleton

“He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very young age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. (...) But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinently shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.”
― Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

“O seasons, O castles,
What soul is without flaws?
All its lore is known to me,
Felicity, it enchants us all.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell & Other Poems

“Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos.”
― Assia Djebar, Children of the New World

“Le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Lettere del veggente

“Okay, there were loads of French poets, but Arthur Rimbaud was fucking out there!”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“For River to discover himself in Rimbaud's life and Miller's prose was simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-pitying. Tellingly, he was more interested in Miller's book than in Rimbaud's actual writing: he responded to Rimbaud not as a poet, but as a symbol.”
― Gavin Edwards, Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind

“It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

“The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

“Ce qu'il y a de brutal et d'exemplaire chez Rimbaud, c'est qu'il rend la vie inutile. Inutilisable. Toute lecture, toute ambition intellectuelle, hors de question. Puisqu'un Rimbaud est possible, tout est vain. Il arrive et il parle. Et sa parole est un chant. Et ce chant implique tous les chants possibles. Et les annule. L'expérience, la durée, l'homme sont ici mis en déroute. Il renverse toutes les lois, en imposant la loi qui est et reste le haut fait d'être ce que l'on est. Il ne vit que par raccroc, il respire parce qu'il faut bien. Et peu importe alors ce qu'il va faire de cette vie dérisoire. Sa poche d'ignorance, d'inspiration est préservée. Il rend à ce qu'on nomme la vie le suprême hommage, qui consiste à opérer comme si l'on n'avait que faire de ce qu'elle laisse espérer. Héritier milliardaire qui vivrait comme si ce trésor ne lui était de rien. Superbe mépris. Il rendra la cassette pleine, sans même s'être soucié d'en vérifier les richesses. Antiphilosophe extrême qui respecte aussi peu la mort que la vie. Il avance oreilles bouchées, lèvres closes, muet jusqu'au rire; oui, proprement angélique. Brûlant toutes ses cartes sans calcul, sans préméditation, sans plaisir. Il est ce qu'il est et fait ce qu'il fait. Le secret de Rimbaud, c'est l'évidence. Un rien de présence déplacée et c'en était fait. Il réussissait ou il échouait. Alors que son destin n'est pas qualifiable. Est le présent même.”
― Georges Perros, Papiers collés

“Arthur was six years old when I left the family. Due to my infrequent stays at home, we did not form a strong bond. Occasionally, I longed for the lost fatherhood. Did he long for his lost childhood?
I did not have a chance to tell him about the sea in which the stars float, about the red, fiery sunrises and sunsets, about the storm that tosses a ship like a nutshell, about flocks of screeching seagulls, schools of fish, and picturesque islets. I wanted to spin a tale about life in the desert, about the scorching sand burning the feet and the hot air shimmering with strange mirages. About wild, freedom-loving people, bizarre customs, and exotic beasts.
I remember him squatting over a puddle at dusk.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“Not long after, a response came. Verlaine invited Rimbaud to Paris. He sent along a one-way ticket. Paris was waiting for the young genius. It was about time. Arthur’s mother had had enough of him, and her ultimatum was running out: either he would find a job or he would be out on the street. He was almost seventeen and was neither in job nor in education, even though peace had come, and the school had reopened its doors.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“It seemed that his spontaneous roaming was a well-planned learning expedition. I suspect that his rebellion and degeneracy were also premeditated. Apparently, they were a kind of intellectual rule, akin to a monastic rule, designed to lead to enlightenment. Unfortunately, his study curriculum also involved a significant degree of self-destruction as the fastest path to self-discovery.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“On that September Sunday, when the excited Paul went to meet Rimbaud, the worst began. Young Rimbaud, that great talent, that poetic genius whom all of Paris supposedly awaited, must have missed Paul at the train station because he arrived alone. To our astonishment, maman and I did not see any genius but rather an uncouth and unkempt boy in shabby, dirty attire, who spoke strangely with an Ardennes accent, if he spoke at all, for he hardly said anything. He had no luggage, which raised suspicion with my mother. A person without luggage was not to be trusted. But he had beautiful blue eyes that looked shy, or so I thought at the time. Meanwhile, those innocent eyes gazed at the world cunningly and maliciously, as it would soon become apparent. Behind that childlike, pretty face of a doll hid a corrupted monster that shattered our family happiness.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“Paul went to pick him up at the train station, but they must have failed to meet because Rimbaud came on his own, on foot. I expected him to be similar to my beloved romantic poets. Beautiful and childishly pure like Alfred de Musset. Or divinely handsome like Lamartine, with the appearance of a Greek god. Or manly and strikingly comely like Chateaubriand, gazing at the sea as the breeze blows his long curls of hair. As a young girl, I was in love with the poetry of our bards and their portraits.
Meanwhile, here in front of our well-kept house, I saw a sloppy rascal in tattered clothes, with disheveled hair, a sweaty face, and no luggage! I was itching to ask: and where is your Sunday garb? A change of underwear? Toothbrush, clothes brush, shoe brush, handkerchief, comb? Well, call me overly idealistic, but I genuinely believed that a normal person couldn’t do without these things.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“Because even though the portrait itself is interesting, I don’t look very favorable in it. I resemble Jesus Christ after twenty years of drinking absinthe. I have serious, sadly drooping eyes and the pale, emaciated face of a consumptive. Pastel colors have been set free, fluttering like butterflies. At first glance, they seem to have no fixed place on the canvas, only the gaze of the observer can pin them down. They are soft and resonate chromatically.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“What raises my doubts, and what still troubles and haunts me, is a sort of deliberate lack of precision in the sonnet “Vowels,â€� or perhaps even a conscious casualness and some subversion lurking in this masterpiece, undermining my theory in a perfidious way, as I have reason to suspect that Rimbaud couldn’t care less whether “Aâ€� was black or white.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“The conclusions of the medical examination of the accused Verlaine, conducted by doctors Semal and Vlemincks, the court also considered an aggravating circumstance. The medical report states that Verlaine’s penis is short and thin, and the glans is small and tapers toward the tip, which would indicate active pederasty. The rectum can be easily dilated by slightly parting the buttocks to a depth of about three centimeters. In this way, the enlarged infundibulum is exposed, resembling a truncated cone with a concave top. Although the sphincter folds contract almost normally, passive pederasty is also highly probable.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!

“Living among the wild blacks, for whom killing a man is like spitting, and killing a white man elevates the status of a warrior, was a balm to me, soothing the unbearable pain of an existence based on convention, the Ten Commandments, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In Africa, I took a few lives by my own hand, but it was either in self-defense or to protect valuable cargo I was transporting. I don’t count the slaves traveling with the caravan because they always dropped like flies and were worth less than camels.”
― Dariusz Radziejewski, Adieu, Rimbaud!