The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.

We understand nature by resisting it.

To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.

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.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.

Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.