H.W. Charles Quotes

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.

There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love

What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!

Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.

You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.

A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.

Peace comes when there is no cloud between us and God. Peace is the consequence of forgiveness, God's removal of that which obscures His face and so breaks union with Him.

Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.

We must.. We must bring our own light to the darkness

Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.

The years have gone by quickly. Death sits in the seat next to me. We make a lovely couple.

whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn't help the mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?

There's music in everything, even defeat

We are all museums of fear.

The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.

Find what you love and let it kill you. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

I'm going, she said. I love you but you're crazy, you're doomed.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late

A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

Each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

I feel strangely normal.

It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.

I'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret.

… and we are in bed together laughing and we don’t care about anything.