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"And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."
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"When you are very rational, you may not be able to dream or live in a fairy tale."

"Fairytales are healthy for the children. As they grow up, the magical thinking wears off, but the fairytale-induced creative brain circuits stay forever."

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."

"How crazy it would be if the moon did spin and the earth stood still and the sun went dim!How absolutely ludicrous if snakes could walk and kids could fly and mimes did talk!How silly it would be if the nights were tan and the mornings green and the sun cyan!How totally ridiculous if horses chirped and spiders sang and ladies burped!How shocking it would be if the dragons ruled and the knights were daft but the fish were schooled!How utterly preposterous if rain were dry and snowflakes warm and real men cried!I love to just imagineall the lows as heights,and the salty, sweet,and our lefts as rights.Perhaps it is incredibleand off the hook,but it all makes sensein a storybook!"

"I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means."

"If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Matresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above the wine-dark sea and give babies only to maidens and musicians who had prayed long and hard. Lost girls wouldn't need compasses or maps. They would find gingerbread paths to lead them out of the forest and home again. They would never sleep in silver boxes with white velvet sheets, not until they were wrinkled-paper grandmas and ready for the trip."

"A tree house, to me, is the most royal palace in the world."

"You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table."

"The world cannot be translated, It can only be dreamed of and touched."

"There was a moment of silence as they imagined a future in which there existed an organisation that stole imagination for, undoubtedly, a sinister plan."
Explore more quotes by James Merrill

"Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem."

"He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline."

"At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw."

"Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images."

"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice."

"Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication."
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