“Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.”
A statement written soon after the end of World War II, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff
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René Char 4
20th-century French poet 1907–1988Related quotes
Friends, Voters, Countrymen p59
2000s, 2001
“Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.”
Poems and Ballads (1866-89), The Triumph of Time
Context: p>The pulse of war and passion of wonder,
The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,
The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,
The music burning at heart like wine,
An armed archangel whose hands raise up
All senses mixed in the spirit's cup
Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder —
These things are over, and no more mine. These were a part of the playing I heard
Once, ere my love and my heart were at strife;
Love that sings and hath wings as a bird,
Balm of the wound and heft of the knife.
Fairer than earth is the sea, and sleep
Than overwatching of eyes that weep,
Now time has done with his one sweet word,
The wine and leaven of lovely life.</p
"In the Dead of Night" as translated by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut in Perfume of the Desert
Source: [Farewell to Venizelos, Time magazine, Monday, Mar. 25, 1935, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748601-1,00.html] ; Venizelos at the final years of his life.
Song lyrics, Your Funeral… My Trial (1986), Your Funeral… My Trial