Quotations by Author

Gaston Bachelard

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Man is an imagining being.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.