Aime Cesaire Quotations

Communism has served us ill in having us swap a living brotherhood for what looks to have the features of the coldest of all chill abstractions.

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.

Out of the sky, the birds, the parrots, the bells, silk, cloth, and drums, out of Sundays dancing, children's words and love words, out of love for the little fists of children, I will build a world, my world with round shoulders.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.

The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

Africa, help me to go home, carry me like an aged child in your arms. Undress me and wash me. Strip me of all of these garments, strip me as a man strips off dreams when the dawn comes. . . .

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.