Literary Birthday – 3 October – Louis Aragon

Louis Aragon Quotes

1. I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
2. Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
3. Most people have never known solitude…. But there are a few of the other kind who can go back to their rooms anywhere and close the door on the whole world, and feel that they need never emerge.
4. Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvellous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.
5. We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Louis Aragon was a French poet, novelist, and editor. He was a founder of Surrealism with Paul Éluard, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, and others. He is the author of Treatise on Style and Paris Peasant. In the work Le Con d’Irène (1928), Aragon spoke about the influence of automatic writing: ‘What I am thinking naturally expresses itself. Everyone’s language differs each from each. I for example do not think without writing, which is to say that writing is my method of thinking.’ After the second world war, Aragon wrote a number of nonfictional studies, monographs, translations, and books on history, politics, art, and culture. He published more than 100 books during his lifetime He was one of the most important writers in post-war France, and his spirit as well as his writing did much to shape the intellectual landscape. From 1953 to 1972 Aragon was editor of the communist cultural weekly Les Lettres Françaises. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honour in 1981.

Source for Image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_Aragon.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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