I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them
Interpretation
The quote expresses a longing for transcendence and the desire to connect deeply with beauty.
Alfred De Musset's quote reveals a profound yearning to immerse oneself in the beauty and wonder of the stars, symbolizing a desire for a deep connection with the universe. This longing can be interpreted as a metaphor for seeking inspiration and dreaming beyond the ordinary, suggesting that one wishes to experience the sublime and to find solace in something greater than oneself.
In practice
In a creative writing workshop, when discussing the importance of longing in poetry.
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep
What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream
The only true language in the world is a kiss.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings.
The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.
I want paint to work as flesh.
Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.
A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us.
There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.
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