If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

It will always be a fact that the woman is the person one idealizes, also the person who wishes his idealization.

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

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

It is a poor reverie which invites a nap. One must even wonder whether, in this "failing asleep", the subconscious itself does not undergo a decline in being.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.