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

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.

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

He who ceases to learn cannot adequately teach.

There is no original truth, only original error.

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.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

I think I discovered my first, you know, my first image of a naked woman was sort of sneaking a peek at one of those magazines that was in my dad’s store.

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

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

When the image is new, the world is new.

To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.