The human mind has claimed for water one of its highest values-the value of purity.

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

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

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.

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.