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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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"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend..."

"The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies."

"Few people have the imagination for reality."

"But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in."

"I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of FA¡fnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril."

"Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!"

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

"The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords."

"A Halloween flower,if ever there was one,would smell like an onion,have thorns like a rose.With charcoal black petalsand vines that entangle,t'would grow under moonlightin mud, I suppose."

"Dare to imagine. Dare to be. Books are the seeds. Dreams are the soil. The fruit of the harvest, a world reborn."
Explore more quotes by James Merrill

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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