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Guillaume Apollinaire Quotes

1880–1918 France

Guillaume Apollinaire (26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish descent who was hugely influential as a Modernist poet and as a spokesman for the Cubist painters. His original name appears in many forms along the lines of Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky or Wąż-Kostrowicki.

France
Novelists
Playwrights
Poets

Random Guillaume Apollinaire quote

19 quotes

And for your eyes my life takes poison slowly.

Alcools (1912)

We mean to explore kindness and its enormous silences.

Calligrammes (1918)

And the single string of the marine trumpets.

Alcools (1912)

O mouths humanity seeks a new language
Beyond the reach of grammarians

Calligrammes (1918)

Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

Les peintres cubistes (1913)

And love runs down like this
Water, love runs down.
How slow life is,
How violent hope is.

Alcools (1912)

We hurry since everything hurries
And I shall never not return
Memories are all archaic horns
Silenced by the wind.

Alcools (1912)

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

O pretty ship, my memory
Isn't this far enough to sea,
And the sea not fit to drink?
Haven't we drifted far and lost
From fair dawn to dreary dusk?

Alcools (1912)

From this new alliance – for until now costume and scenery on one hand, choreography on the other, have been linked only artificially – there has resulted in Parade a kind of sur-réalisme.

I've made a song for the poorly loved
And songs for everything I grieved –
For unaccompanied slave and shark,
For queens who've gone into the dark.

Alcools (1912)

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent

Alcools (1912)

And now comes the summer of violence
And my youth is as dead as the springtime
O Sun it is the time of fiery Reason

Calligrammes (1918)

One day
One day I waited for myself
I said to myself Guillaume it's time you came
So I could know just who I am
I who know others

Alcools (1912)

Under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine.
Why must I be reminded again
Of our love?
Doesn't happiness issue from pain?
Bring on the night, ring out the hour.
The days wear on but I endure.

Alcools (1912)

I used to walk by the river
An old book under my arm
The river is the same as pain
It elapses mindlessly
And when will the week be over

Alcools (1912)

At last you're tired of this elderly world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You're fed up living with antiquity

Alcools (1912)

I picked this sprig of heather
Autumn has died you must remember
We shall not see each other ever
I'm waiting and you must remember
Time's perfume is a sprig of heather

Alcools (1912)

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew.

Misattributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Guillaume Apollinaire (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.