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
Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the deep connection between words and the thoughts and dreams they evoke from our past.
Gaston Bachelard reflects on the profound significance of words, suggesting that they are not merely tools for communication but vessels for our memories and dreams. Words carry the essence of our past experiences and emotions, creating a rich tapestry of reverie that influences our perceptions and understanding of the world.
In practice
Using this quote in a literary discussion about the power of language.
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.
Do not paint a picture either of God or the devil on your walls: this will ruin both your walls and the atmosphere.
The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.
We do not celebrate the death of our enemies.
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Life is God's novel. Let him write it.
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