Gaston Bachelard - Poetics of reverie

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The words of the world want to make sentences.

Gaston Bachelard
Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Gaston Bachelard
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

Gaston Bachelard
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
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.

Gaston Bachelard
I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting.

Gaston Bachelard
Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

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

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

Gaston Bachelard