Gaston Bachelard Quotes

"One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."

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

"So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us."

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

"I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company."