Roman Payne Quotes

The birthing wolf,Her heart fed with tenderness,Gave forth from ripe brown nipples,Food to feed the universe.

~ Roman Payne

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.And to their girls, they will give,while with their sons they'll share;where I will bear a song—a son! The wife of despair.

~ Roman Payne

I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest,Children dying in the road,Crawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.

~ Roman Payne

Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.

~ Roman Payne

No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman’s voice.

~ Roman Payne

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.

~ Roman Payne

In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I’ve a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy—opium and other miserable beauties.

~ Roman Payne

We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, We take to smoke divine and wine.If breath of sun does belch its heat,we boil coffee and prepare to eat.

~ Roman Payne

We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, we take to smoke divine and wine. If breath of sun does belch its heat, we boil coffee and prepare to eat.

~ Roman Payne

Our eyes will know the heavens if our lips stay for each other.

~ Roman Payne

Never had we ever kissed as lovers; if we touched lips it was as brother and sister. In one moment of emotion, our lips fell together by accident, but we quickly removed ourselves as though we were children touching glass with dirty hands.

~ Roman Payne

I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.

~ Roman Payne

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my troth, for our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul

~ Roman Payne

In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for ‘Woman.’ En anglais, nous n’avons aucun mot semblable à l’exquise ‘Jouissance!

~ Roman Payne

She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my trothfor our love is whole;her breath is my wine,her scent is my soul.

~ Roman Payne

Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.

~ Roman Payne

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. 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

Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)

~ Roman Payne

Wanderess, Wanderess, weave us a story of seduction and ruse. Heroic be the Wanderess, the world be her muse.

~ Roman Payne

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

I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth.

~ Roman Payne

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.

~ Roman Payne

There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.

~ Roman Payne

She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last. You will see that we are not lovers like others, for whom love is both a punishment and a gift… Our love has never punished, only rewarded. Such love therein lies the eudaimonic life.

~ Roman Payne

The tragedy of Dionysus: Wear a black robe at night, and white you’ll wear by morning; but wear a purple robe to the midnight feast, and when you wake you’ll dress in black to mourn your soul deceased.

~ Roman Payne

Wine gives one 'ideas,' whereas champagne gives one 'strategies.

~ Roman Payne

Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.

~ Roman Payne

She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last.

~ Roman Payne

He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter’s face when she blushed.

~ Roman Payne

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

~ Roman Payne

I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)

~ Roman Payne

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.

~ Roman Payne

A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.

~ Roman Payne

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.

~ Roman Payne

Who worries for dying? If I close my eyes tonight, I will either dream, or not, or my eyes will open and I will be here again. And if none of those happen, and I do not wake? Who worries for dying?

~ Roman Payne

A girl without braids is like a city without bridges.

~ Roman Payne

She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She was brave, and I never once saw her cry out of fear. She never cried because she was afraid that something would happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, would not happen… She believed if I gave in to make her fortune become realized, the world would be ultimately profound and beautiful. I guess I held out because I feared the realization of her fortune would mean the destruction of us together. And each time she cried, I fell a little more deeply in love with her.

~ Roman Payne

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

~ Roman Payne

A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.

~ Roman Payne

If you love my work, you are a good critic. If you do not love my work, you are a 'not good' critic.

~ Roman Payne