“I have swallowed a secret burning thread.”

"Daddy’s Little Pumpkin" (Prine, Pat McLaughlin)
Song lyrics, The Missing Years (1991)

Source: Lettres à Génica Athanasiou

Source: Affinity

Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, January 8, 1972, page 11.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1972

Page 44.
Source: Invisible Cities (1972)
Context: With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Source: Incantation

Dark Night of the Soul

Midnight's Children (1981)
Context: Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

J'ai seulement fait ici un amas de fleurs étrangères, n'y ayant fourni du mien que le filet à les lier.
Book III, Ch. 12 : Of Physiognomy
Essais (1595), Book III