Paul Verlaine Quotes

#1. A flat black bug, that is London.

Paul Verlaine

#2. Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck.

Paul Verlaine

#3. Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town.

Paul Verlaine

#4. Music before all else,
and for that choose the irregular,
which is vaguer and melts better into the air ...

Paul Verlaine

#5. Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust,
Your childhood is a bower:
Let my fingers wander in the moss
Where glows the rosebud
Let me among the clean grasses
Drink the drops of dew
Which sprinkle the tender flower

Paul Verlaine

#6. Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches, and here is my heart which beats only for you.

Paul Verlaine

#7. A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

Paul Verlaine

#8. Night. Rain. A livid sky pierces the lacework
Of spires and towers, the silhouette of a Gothic
Town dim in the gray distance.

Paul Verlaine

#9. An infinite
Resignedness
Rains where the white
Mists opalesce
In the moon-shower ...

Paul Verlaine

#10. What we need, we, is fixedness intense, Unequalled effort, strife that shall not cease,

Paul Verlaine

#11. Take eloquence and wring its neck.

Paul Verlaine

#12. Prends l'e loquence et tords-lui son cou! Take eloquence and break its neck!

Paul Verlaine

#13. A vast black sleep falls over my life sleep, all hope sleep, all desire.

Paul Verlaine

#14. Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town.

Paul Verlaine

#15. I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

Paul Verlaine

#16. Of its persistent, artless strain: Naught so can soothe a soul's own pain, As making glad another soul!

Paul Verlaine

#17. The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

Paul Verlaine

#18. I like this word decadent; all shimmering and purple and gold.

Paul Verlaine