— Message as a member of the French resistance, to his superiors in London, insisting that certain codewords "The library is on fire" be changed after a disastrous parachute drop which set a forest on fire and alerted the Gestapo to the location of his group of Maquis fighters, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff
“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
“Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.”
— A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.