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"My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind."
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"The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem."

"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."

"Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible."

"I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster. But I didn't want to think about that. I didn't want to wonder what would happen next."

"It faintly irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on to the scene to make it work for him. All this Margrathea nonsense seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

"It is always imagined before it is lived. In the world of thought, imaginations are lives, but people kill them before they grow to have life!"

"It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it."

"When you are very rational, you may not be able to dream or live in a fairy tale."

"Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates."

"One thinks of nothing,' he continued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
Explore more quotes by Tahir Shah


"I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand."


"A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation."


"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."


"As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end."


"Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them."


"An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems."


"For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure."


"The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence."
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