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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the connection between reading and the desire to write, suggesting that reading stimulates our inner poet.
Gaston Bachelard reflects on the powerful relationship between reading and writing. He posits that when we engage in reading, we are not only absorbing the thoughts and emotions of others but also confronting our own unfulfilled aspirations to create. This desire to express ourselves as writers is nurtured in the act of reading, as we resonate with the language and ideas presented, even if we choose to suppress our inclination to write.
Themes
ReadingWritingPoetryAspirationLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the impact of reading on creativity.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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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.
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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.
Gaston BachelardRead
The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
Gaston BachelardRead
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