from Soap (Francis Ponge)

"So we slip from words to meanings with a lucid inebriety, or rather, an effervescence, an iridescent though lucid and cold ebullition, which we come out of with hands purer than before this exercise begins."

"To gibber, is to say what? To make oneself ridiculous, to ridicule words a little."

"Even if one stood under the purest torrents. Or in the silence of the darkest and coldest source, where the temptation might occur to you, o absolute young man, of drowning yourself. Even if one dived down the well of truth, no! None of this is enough to make the dirt on the skin so much as raise its eyebrows. Thus, living under the pump is good for nothing, with the risk of hiccupping your way from life to death."

"Yet it will still be necessary that each phrase, based on a concrete expression of its reality, be valid for it alone, mean nothing in regard to any other object."

"Its appearance reveals a painfully achieved compromise- and, it seems, constantly regained as it is constantly lost again- between the temptation to endure, to conserve itself, to perpetuate itself, in an ever more perfect silence and dryness (the finished type of this perfection represented, if you like, by a stone)- and the feeling, on the other hand, that this is neither its duty nor, considered and honestly judged, its nature, its real end, which is rather that it be used, I say, and lose itself in its function, its service, and finally, to fulfill its usefulness."

"The anxiety of inaction cracks it. And certainly, it never conserves itself better than when it is inactive, forgotten."

"That the real makers (and not merely contemplators) of these objects are the writers, the poets, and that it is on us, and us alone, as such, that the power has devolved to forge the keys of the world, or the ciphers which allow us to recognize ourselves in it, or to open and close its doors at (...if you believe in this word...) 'liberty.'"