“The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.”

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.

Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it’s that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records.

I’m about five inches from being an outstanding golfer. That’s the distance my left ear is from my right.

I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

I was tired of admiring your legs from a distance.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

Emerson,’ I said, choosing my words with care, ‘it is a sheer drop from the cleft down to the base of the cliff. If you are bent on breaking your arm or your leg or your neck or all three, find a place closer to home so we won’t have to carry you such a distance.

Because even a sliver of distance between us is infuriating.