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Authors & Writing
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A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Books
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Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Children
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Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Desires
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Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Dreams
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Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Home
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If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Ideas
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Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Imagination
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Man is an imagining being.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Language
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Life
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To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Mistakes
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There is no original truth, only original error.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Past, the
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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.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Philosophy
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Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Progress
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The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Reading
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To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Sleep
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The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Words
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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.
-Gaston Bachelard
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The words of the world want to make sentences.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Books by and about Gaston Bachelard