“Past the period of the revelation and enthusiasm of its beginnings, surrealism was ineluctably destined to blend in with preexisting ways of feeling, ways of living, and ways of writing, because its initial stakes were entirely placed on exceptionally rare conjunctions, almost as slow to reproduce themselves as the conjunctions of stars, and which it could not ultimately claim to read in the book of life in the faint glow of a flash of lightning (the singular merit of Nadja is to almost convince you, through the potent charm of the writing, that such conjunctions could be rather frequent and form the fabric of a life). But blending in was what Breton could not accept, could never accept. In wanting to establish surrealism as an autonomous and closed way of living, the problem was making a lifestyle work full time that in the last analysis relied only on miracles, intermittent by definition . . . .”

(Julien Gracq, “Surrealism”, pp. 301–302 in Reading Writing, trans. Jeanine Herman)