“Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.”

Childhood lasts all through life.

We must listen to poets.

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

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.

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn’t really our solitude.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.

Man is an imagining being.

Comedy can simultaneously allow you to dive headfirst into the world’s pain and escape it.

I can’t take it all in or else I’ll grow cold when the heat already escapes my fingers and toes.

Reading has always been my sweetest escape, but I write to convey that which I want to escape or what scares me to say, even if it’s something positive.

I escaped the voice of darkness that was as pervasive as the silence that has come to replace all the words you had misplaced.

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

We possess our body by chance and we are already pleased with it. If our physical bodies went through ten thousand transformations without end, how incomparable would this joy be! Therefore the sage roams freely in the realm in which nothing can escape, but all endures.

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.