Roman Payne Quotes

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

~ Roman Payne

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure.

~ Roman Payne

All that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.

~ Roman Payne

Even the memory of cradling her in my arms is pure euphoria. And all that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.

~ Roman Payne

The poet believed that 'Beauty' first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that 'Beauty' entered the world the day the first child blushed.

~ Roman Payne

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!... except of course when they are alone.

~ Roman Payne

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.

~ Roman Payne

It’s not that we have to leave this life one day, it's how many things we have to leave all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, wine, summertime, drunkenness, and the physics of falling leaves, clothing, myrrh, perfumed hair, flirting friends, two strangers' glance; the reflection of the moon, with words like, 'Soon' ... 'do you want me?' ... '...to lie enlaced' ... 'and sleep entwined' thinking ahead, with thoughts behind...?' Ô, Why!Why can’t we leave this life slowly?

~ Roman Payne

Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: mystery, fate, enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we're not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world they preside over.

~ Roman Payne

Those things: Mystery, Fate, and Enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we’re not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world the young preside over.

~ Roman Payne

After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks.

~ Roman Payne

What a face this girl possessed!—Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born.

~ Roman Payne

I saw this moment as attached by threads to eternity and woven between all the other braided moments of my past and my future.

~ Roman Payne

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.

~ Roman Payne

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a serious novel.

~ Roman Payne

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

~ Roman Payne

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

~ Roman Payne

This was the first time I thought of S— that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?

~ Roman Payne

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

~ Roman Payne

I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.

~ Roman Payne

Life is Not a perpetual climb towards Greatness.For our family, ourselves, and friends,It is but sad Decay, so,Let every girl die after her Hebé (Ἥβη).And every man after his Aristeia(ἀριστεία).

~ Roman Payne

Wherever you go in the next catastrophéBe it sickroom, or prison, or cemet’ryDo not fear that your stay will besolit’ryCountless souls share your fate,you’ll have company!

~ Roman Payne

May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.

~ Roman Payne

As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two things should stand only one thing for him... Honor. A man's honor should be more sacred to him than his life — especially in our age, a time when very few men know what honor is.

~ Roman Payne

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

~ Roman Payne

I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.

~ Roman Payne

In my errant life I roamedTo learn the secrets of women and men,Of gods and dreams.I've known all the countries of our world,I've lived a thousand lives:Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I squandered.For in my life I never traveled, All I did was wander.

~ Roman Payne

I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.

~ Roman Payne

From all that I saw,and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.

~ Roman Payne

[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.

~ Roman Payne

Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.

~ Roman Payne

The artist's greatest creation beganthe night he washed his memory of his failuresrubbed opium on his lipsdrank the wine that women offered himand lay down and wept.

~ Roman Payne

To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.

~ Roman Payne

All that I desire in life are three...A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,A puff of opium,And thee.

~ Roman Payne

The comedy in our lives was those first few weeks we lived together in Paris: Our bodies desired one another, our souls opened for one another. We experienced all of the happiness and anguish of first love. Those first few weeks in Paris, we barely touched lips; yet the few times we did, it had the force of a collision of stars.

~ Roman Payne

Ah, youth!It was a beautiful night...The moon was out of orbit.The stars were awry.But everything else was exactlyas it should have been.

~ Roman Payne

Let these men sing out their songs,they've been walking all day long,all their fortune's spent and gone...silver dollar in the subway station;quarters for the papers for the jobs.

~ Roman Payne

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

~ Roman Payne

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

~ Roman Payne

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

~ Roman Payne