Quotes from book

The Poetics of Space

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

“When the image is new, the world is new.”

“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.”

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

“Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”

“We must listen to poets.”

“Words … are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in ‘foreign commerce’ on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.”

“The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.”