“With my teeth
I have seized life
Upon the knife of my youth.”
"Mute Game", as translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson in Guernica : a magazine of art & politics (June 2007)<!-- Stone Lyre (2010) -->
Context: With my teeth
I have seized life
Upon the knife of my youth.
With my lips today,
With my lips alone…
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René Char 4
20th-century French poet 1907–1988Related quotes
St. 4.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)
“Imagineminus 'Mack the Knife.' That's what my life would be like without you.”
Source: Sputnik Sweetheart
Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?
“I have always, from my earliest youth, rejoiced in the felicity of my fellow-men”
Boston Massacre Oration (1774)
Context: I have always, from my earliest youth, rejoiced in the felicity of my fellow-men; and have ever considered it as the indispensable able duty of every member of society to promote, as far as in him lies, the prosperity of every individual, but more especially of the community to which he belongs; and also, as a faithful subject of the State, to use his utmost endeavors to detect, and having detected, strenuously to oppose every traitorous plot which its enemies may devise for its destruction. Security to the persons and properties of the governed is so obviously the design and end of civil government, that to attempt a logical proof of it would be like burning tapers at noonday, to assist the sun in enlightening the world; and it cannot be either virtuous or honorable to attempt to support a government of which this is not the great and principal basis; and it is to the last degree vicious and infamous to attempt to support a government which manifestly tends to render the persons and properties of the governed insecure. Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny.
