The Thief's Journal

“When the whores aren't around, the cops are” is an underworld proverb.

Though I had not managed to commit the crime, I had at least been gently bathed in the fringe of its dawning.

If I am accused of using such theatrical props as fun fairs, prisons, flowers, sacrilegious pickings, stations, frontiers, opium, sailors, harbors, urinals, funerals, cheap hotel rooms, of creating mediocre melodramas and confusing poetry with cheap local color, what can I answer? I have said that I love outlaws who have no other beauty than that of their bodies.

(he once assured me that he had protected his ass with his spread fingers. “The old guy thought he was screwing me, but it was only my hand. I made believe I was sleeping. He shot into my fingers.”)

His speech was clipped. He was afraid that if he lengthened the syllables his whole soul might droop

I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.

I am escaping from the reformatory, taking tiny steps, frightened not at the idea of being caught but of being the prey of freedom;

“When I walk along the street,” I wondered, “am I being envied by the loveliest and wealthiest of señoritas? What roguish prince, what infanta in rags, can walk about and have so handsome a lover?”

“If something happens,” I said to myself, “it will be the appearance of a unicorn. Such a moment and such a place can only produce a unicorn.”

I call regard all flowers without pity; they are members of my family.