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

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.

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.

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

This life of ours, human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up–no more flower.

I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.

Turning pain into poetry turns rainy days into rainbows and raw dirt into meadows.