“A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage… And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad…”

Ecuador (1929)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The wa…" by Henri Michaux?
Henri Michaux photo
Henri Michaux 8
painter, poet, writer 1899–1984

Related quotes

Klaus Kinski photo
Noel Gallagher photo
Josh Groban photo
Max Stirner photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Gillian Anderson photo

“London is my favourite city in the world. Flying in last night, I felt I was really coming home, and that's unique. It's the only place I actually miss when I'm not here. London appeals to many aspects of me - it just feels like where I belong.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Clarke Hayes The Spectator Blog "Switching off the spotlight" http://www.gilliananderson.ws/transcripts/10_15/11Spectator.shtml (October 14, 2011)
2010s

Dan Deacon photo
Sarah Bernhardt photo

“I cannot walk a single step or make any movement or gesture, sit down, go out, look at the sky or ground, without feeling some reason for hope or despair, until at last, exasperated by the trammels put upon my actions by my thought, I defy all superstitions and just act as I want to act.”

Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) French actress

Source: My Double Life (1907), Ch. 33 <!-- p. 362 -->
Context: I am so superstitious that if I had arrived when there was no sunshine I should have been wretched and most anxious until after my first performance. It is a perfect torture to be superstitious to this degree, and, unfortunately for me, I am ten times more so now than I was in those days, for besides the superstitions of my own country, I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me. I cannot walk a single step or make any movement or gesture, sit down, go out, look at the sky or ground, without feeling some reason for hope or despair, until at last, exasperated by the trammels put upon my actions by my thought, I defy all superstitions and just act as I want to act.

Peggy Moran photo

Related topics