Manifeste de la poésie vécue (1994) - Alain Jouffroy

Un manifeste surgit d'un manque de parole et d'écoute. Il révèle ce qu'Amiel appelait une conscience consciente d'elle-même, porte l'attention sur ce dont on ne parle pas, ou trop peu, s'oppose en toutes lettres à une invivable domination. Écrivant un manifeste, on projette une idée, qu'on juge nécessaire, sur ce mur où il est plus que jamais "défendu d'afficher" ce dont on se sait le plus intimement convaincu, ce mur qui sépare chacun de tous au lieu d'être abattu par tous.
(p. 21)


Le premier point d'ancrage qui a disparu, c'est la croyance au pouvoir de la poésie dans la vie.
(p. 23)


Ce qui résiste le plus, c'est notre extraordinaire tendance à l'aveuglement. Nos paupières sont distraction de nos pupilles et paupières. Et cela, dans un temps où, dans les mégapoles, la lumières est envahie par ce gris plombé qui pétrifie l'espace et le temps tous les dimanches après-midi, un temps où les fenêtres allumées en pleine nuit se font partout de plus en plus rares.
(p. 30)


Peindre non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit.
(p. 33)


L'utopie qui m'anime consiste à restituer une part plus grande de la réalité du monde, des univers visibles et invisibles qui le composent, à l'intérieur même de chaque geste, de chaque action-création poétique.
(p. 47)


Je considère que les pages des livres sont les lieux de rencontres réelles avec des individus qui, sans leur lecture, vivraient leur propre pensée comme une insupportable séparation.
(p. 48)


Un poète n'a pas une obligation d'écriture. Il n'a qu'une obligation de regard.


Le regard est cette interrogation inlassable, qui met en contact l'appréhension que nous avons du monde avec le monde lui-même.

Une révolution permanente du regard est la condition de la réalisation dans la vie.
(p. 55)

Tales of ordinary madness (1972) - Charles Bukowski

Then I began hoping the plane would lose a wing and then I'd really get to see what the faces of the stewardesses looked like.
(p. 33)



"Bukowski ! Just because I have long hair, you think I'm a girl ! My name is Paul ! We were introduced ! Don't you remember ?"
Paul's father, Harvey, was looking at me. I saw his eyes. Then I knew that he had decided that I was not such a good writer after all. Maybe even a bad writer. Well, no man can hide forever.
(p. 47)



Then I noticed the Zen master's ears in the candlelight. The candlelight shone through them as if they were made of the thinnest of toilet paper.
The Zen master had the thinnest ears of any man I had ever seen. That was what made him holy ! I had to have those ears ! For my wallet or my tomcat or my memory. Or for under the pillow.
(p. 49)



Unfortunately, the world was molested with billions of people who had nothing to do with their time except murder it and murder you.
(p. 65)



With me, the racetrack tells me quickly where I am weak and where I am strong, and it tells me how I feel that day and it tells me how much we keep changing ALL the time, and how little we know of this.
(p. 73)



Great poets die in steaming pots of shit.
(p. 79)

Trout Fishing in America (1961) - Richard Brautigan

The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, "Here, hold this while I go get a newpaper," and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.
(p. 6)


A little ways up from the shack was an outhouse with its door flung violently open. The inside of the house was exposed like a human face and the outhouse seemed to say, "The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he's dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy. He built me with loving care. Leave me alone. I'm a monument now to a good ass gone under. If you have to crap, go in the bushes like the deer."
(p. 7)


He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.
(p. 10)


When the hammer clicked back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner of its eye. First at the pistol and then at the man. It was a kinf of friendly look as if to say, "When my mother was young she sang like Deanna Durbin."
The man pulled the trigger.
He had no sense of humor.
(p. 13)


I guess it's only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some stove sitting in the woods.
(p. 62)


Then I wiped the puke off my clothes and for some strange reason suddenly it was a perfect time, there at Mushroom Springs, to wonder whatever happened to the Zoot suit.
(p. 78)


She was soon running around with a big cutthroat trout in her hands, carrying it like a harp on her way to a concert - ten minutes late with no bus in sight and no taxi either.
(p. 79)


In the summer Id' thow endless cords of wood into her basement until I was silly in the head and everything looked like wood, even clouds in the sky and cars parked on the street and cats.
(p. 82)

Terre des hommes (1939) - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

J'ai toujours devant les yeux, l'image de ma première nuit de vol en Argentine, une nuit sombre où scintillaient seules, comme des étoiles, les rares lumières éparses dans la plaine.
Chacune signalait, dans cet océan de ténèbres, le miracle d'une conscience. Dans ce foyer, on lisait, on réfléchissait, on poursuivait des confidences. Dans cet autre, peut-être, on cherchait à sonder l'espace, on s'usait en calculs sur la nébuleuse d'Andromède. Là on aimait. De loin en loin luisaient ces feux dans la campagne qui réclamaient leur nourriture. Jusqu'aux plus discrets, celui du poète, de l'instituteur, du charpentier.
(p.9)


Mais le plus merveilleux était qu'il y eût là, debout sur le dos rond de la planète, entre ce linge aimanté et ces étoiles, une conscience d'homme dans laquelle cette pluie pût se réfléchir comme dans un miroir. Sur une assise de minéraux un songe est un miracle. Et je me souviens d'un songe...
(p.63)


Et cependant, je me découvris plein de songes.
Ils me vinrent sans bruit, comme des eaux de source, et je ne compris pas, tout d'abord, la douceur qui m'envahissait. Il n'y eut point de voix, ni d'images, mais le sentiment d'une présence, d'une amitié très proche et déjà à demi devinée. Puis je compris et m'abandonnai, les yeux fermés, aux enchantements de ma mémoire.
Il était, quelque part, un parc chargé de sapins noirs et de tilleuls, et une vieille maison que j’aimais. Peu importait qu’elle fût éloignée ou proche, qu’elle ne pût ni me réchauffer dans ma chair ni m’abriter, réduite ici au rôle de songe : il suffisait qu’elle existât pour remplir ma nuit de sa présence. Je n’étais plus ce corps échoué sur une grève, je m’orientais, j’étais l’enfant de cette maison, plein du souvenir de ses odeurs, plein de la fraîcheur de ses vestibules, plein des voix qui l’avaient animée. Et jusqu’au chant des grenouilles dans les mares qui venait ici me rejoindre. J’avais besoin de ces mille repères, pour me reconnaître moi-même, pour découvrir de quelles absences était fait le goût de ce désert, pour trouver un sens à ce silence fait de mille silences, où les grenouilles même se taisaient.
(p.65)


Je ne sais pas ce qui se passe en moi. Cette pesanteur me lie au sol quand tant d'étoiles sont aimantées. Une autre pesanteur me ramène à moi-même. Je sens mon poids qui me tire vers tant de choses ! Mes songes sont plus réels que ces dunes, que cette lune, que ces présences. Ah ! le merveilleux d’une maison n’est point qu’elle vous abrite ou vous réchauffe, ni qu’on en possède
les murs. Mais bien qu’elle ait lentement déposé en nous ces provisions de douceur. Qu’elle forme, dans le fond du coeur, ce massif obscur dont naissent, comme des eaux de source, les songes…
(p.67)


C’était tout naturellement qu’avaient disparu les jeunes filles dans cette maison à escamotages. Que devaient être les greniers, quand le salon déjà contenait les richesses d’un grenier ! Quand
on y devinait déjà que, du moindre placard entrouvert, crouleraient des liasses de lettres jaunes, des quittances de l’arrière-grand-père, plus de clefs qu’il n’existe de serrures dans la maison, et dont naturellement aucune ne s’adapterait à aucune serrure. Clefs merveilleusement inutiles, qui confondent la raison, et qui font rêver à des souterrains, à des coffrets enfouis, à des louis d’or.
(p.71)

Art Conteptuel, une entologie (2008) - Gauthier Herrmann, Fabrice Raymond, Fabien Vallos

"Le concept art, dit-il, est avant tout un art dont les concepts sont le matériau, de même que le son, par exemple, est le matériau de la musique. Dans la mesure où les concepts sont étroitement liés au langage, le concept art est une forme d'art dont le matériau est le langage." (Henry Flint)

L'Arrache-Coeur (1953) - Boris Vian

Il affectait un air bon enfant aussi naturel que des guêtres sur une pompe à purain.
(p292)



Deux des poteaux diagonaux ne représentaient guère que des scènes familières de la vie de Jésus : Jésus se grattant les pieds sur le bord du chemin, Jésus se tapant un litre de rouge, Jésus à la pêche à la ligne, bref un résumé de l'imagerie sulpicienne classique. Les deux autres, par contre, possédaient des caractéristiques plus originales. Celui de gauche, le plus voisin de Jacquemort, affectait l'allure générale d'un gros trident, dressé pointes en l'air et tout décoré de sculptures infernales dont certaines semblaient propres (ou sales) à faire rougir un dominicain. Ou plusieurs dominicains. Ou  même le colonel des Jésuites. Le dernier poteau, en forme de croix, portait de façon plus banale, l'effigie du curé, nu, de dos, et en train de chercher un bouton de col sous son lit.
(p324)



Mœurs des maliettes, pensa Jacquemort. Qui les étudiera ? Qui saura les décrire ? Il faudrait un gros livre, sur papier couché illustré d'eaux-fortes en couleurs, dues au burin fertile de nos meilleurs animaliers. Maliettes, maliettes, que n'approfondit-on pas vos mœurs ! Mais las, qui jamais en prit une, maliettes couleur de suie, au poitrail rouge, à l’œil de lune, aux cris légers de petites souris. Maliettes qui mourez pour la moindre cause, lorsqu'on vous regarde trop longtemps, lorsqu'on rit en vous regardant, lorsqu'on vous tourne le dos, lorsqu'on enlève son chapeau, lorsque la nuit se fait attendre, lorsque le soir tombe trop tôt. Maliettes subtiles et tendres dont le cœur occupe, à l'intérieur, toute la place où les autres bêtes logent des organes banals.
(pp.366-367)

It chooses you (2011) - Miranda July

In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I'm stealing, every man thinks I'm a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I'm a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.
(p.11)


This sometimes happens when I'm faced with actualities - it's like déjà vu, but instead of the sensation that this has happened before, I'm suffused with the awareness that this is happening for the first time, that all the other times were in my head.
(pp. 14-17)


So we said goodbye to Michael, nervously heaping on parting graces, and silently rode the elevator back down to the first floor. We stepped out onto sunny Hollywood Boulevard, a street I drive down every day. Now when I drove past this building I would always know that Michael was in there, living on Social Security benefits, enjoying life and desiring only one last thing - to transform into a woman. His conviction ignited me, I felt light and alert. Evidence of his faith in this almost-impossible challenge was everywhere : the pink blouse, the makeup littering the bathroom, the handmade dildoesque wig stand. These were not signals of defeat. This was not someone who was getting sleepy at the end of his journey ; in fact, everything he had lived through made him certain of what mattered now.
(p. 26)


It occurred to me that everyone's story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
(p. 35)


It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
(p. 40)


As I left his I room I said something like "Maybe I'll see you around," as if our generation all liked to congregate at one coffee shop.
But the moment i got back in my car I knew I would never see him again, ever. It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the whole world, and especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it wouldn't happen. LA isn't a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn't in my house or my car we'll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I'm not really with them, I'm with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can't help smiling to myself as I text them back.
(pp. 56-57)


At age sixty-five, an age so far past young as to be almost unfeminine, a woman had decided to photograph herself every single day. It was immediately one of my favorite works of art, all the more significant because she wasn't Sophie Calle of Tracey Emin. She knew no one would clamor for the three rooms' worth of albums ; their value was entirely self-defined. And though of course I wished I had somehow saved the albums, the performance had to end with her dying and the collection being thrown into the dumpster. It was the ending that really made you think.
(p.111)


I'm not especially terrific with numbers, so it was as if he'd just thrown some confetti in the air and called it words.
(p.120)


I’d had a similarly groundbreaking revelation twenty-five years earlier, when I was nine. The epiphany came one night, just before I fell asleep: I would make an entire city out of cereal boxes. I’d collect the boxes over months and I’d paint them, hundreds of them, stores and streets and houses and freeways, forming a whole little world that would be an accurate representation of my hometown, Berkeley (although I wasn’t totally married to the specifics yet—it might be better to make it more of an Everytown, USA, since geography wasn’t my strong suit). The city would take up the whole basement floor and I would bring special people down there, to the basement, and turn on the lights and, boom, their minds would be blown to pieces. After passionately nursing this idea for about an hour, I suddenly had another idea: No I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t make an entire city out of cereal boxes in the basement. The moment I had this second thought, I knew this was the real one. But I also felt certain that the thought itself was the only thing that had stopped me, like a witch’s curse—or, no like the witch hunters, the small-minded, fearful Local Authorities.
From then on to this very moment, I had done everything I could to avoid them, but after almost three superstitious decades I'd come to realize that the Local Authorities are always there,  inside and outside, and they get most riled up when I begin to change. Each time I feel something new, the Local Authorities step in and gently encourage me to burn myself alive.
(pp.178-179)


I'd could call her right now and ask. It almost hurt, remembering that Joe and Carolyn were a part of the world, surrounded by an infinite number of simultaneous stories. I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn't just movies that couldn't contain the full cast of characters - it was us.
(p.216)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) - Jonathan Safran Foer

She also gave me Grandpa's camera, which I loved for two reasons. I asked why he didn't take it with him when he left her. She said, "Maybe he wanted you to have it." I said, "But I was negative-thirty years old." She said, "Still."
(p. 3)



In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.
(p. 38)


That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.
(p. 71)


Time was passing by like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.
(p. 224)


We got at the end of the line for the elevator.
I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.
(p. 247)


It broke my heart into more pieces that my heart was made of.
(pas noté la page)