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 BachelardRead
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
Interpretation
Reading beautiful literature enriches our lives and enhances our sense of existence.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that the experience of being fully alive is closely tied to engaging with beautiful literature. Reading something that captivates us aesthetically not only brings joy but also deepens our appreciation for life and the world around us.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of reading, one could use this quote to emphasize the profound impact of literature.
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.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
Give me such shows - give me the streets of Manhattan!
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.
If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.
I'm surprised by the talent I find all over. There are always new chefs who propose many interesting new ideas, new ways of looking at ingredients.
When you have a large space to conquer, the curve is the natural solution.
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