“In reality, however, the passions simmer and resimmer in solitude: the passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in this solitude. And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell.” PassionCreativitySolitude Book:The Poetics of Space Source: The Poetics of Space
“There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. The epistolary novel expresses love in a beautiful emulation of images and metaphors. To tell a love, one must write. One never writes too much. How many lovers, upon returning home from the tenderest of rendezvous, open their writing desks! Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving. A realist passion will see nothing there but evanescent formulas. But just the same it is no less true that great passions are prepared by great reveries. The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness.” LoveSolitudeLettersReverie Book:The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos Source: The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
“I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting.” GivingDreamWould BeSolitudeLive ByDreamerSummitSplitting Author:Gaston Bachelard
“There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.” SelfHelpingTodayNamesReturnSolitudeOriginalsHistoricalReverie Author:Gaston Bachelard
“Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.” HouseImaginationSpaceRoomsSolitudeCornersSymbolsInchesAngleGermsSecluded Author:Gaston Bachelard
“Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.” KnowsMenWorldFeelsHumansChildrenPeaceChildhoodSonSolitudeRelaxCosmosUnhappinessAche Author:Gaston Bachelard
“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.” LifeDreamPassionStrangeSolitudeRemainsHostilityDaytimeNocturnalOverloaded Author:Gaston Bachelard
“How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.” FeelsDreamChildhoodCommunicationReturnSolitudeOur ChildrenAccidentsDreamerTranquilSlopesReverie Author:Gaston Bachelard
“A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.” DreamCausesMemoriesSituationDramaSolitudeSufficientMelancholySolitaryPretextDecorPrecedenceSad Memories Author:Gaston Bachelard
