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"I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from."
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Exlpore more Imagination quotes
"Reality is not enough for us, that's why we have invented art to create different realities!"
"Lovely thoughts came flying to meet me like birds. They weren't my thoughts. I couldn't think anything half so exquisite. They came from somewhere."
"The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."
"The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing."
"Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love--starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love."
"If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about."
"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."
"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."
"What if dragons breathed bubbles and purred when they cuddled and giggled at chivalrous knights for their troubles?What if dragons felt soft, having scales made of cloth,and they moved rather slow like a brown-throated sloth?What if dragons were shyand did easily crywhen confronted by characters callous and sly?What if dragons did goodbut were misunderstoodso men mercilessly slew the beasts right where they stood?What if dragons aren't missedbecause there is no listof extinct types of quarry that now don't exist?"
"Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time."
Explore more quotes by Amy Tan
"My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of."
"I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese."
"I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house."
"No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn't have encouragement, but I didn't have discouragement, because I don't think anybody knew what that meant."
"I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer."
"She said 'I'm by commission. You don't have to pay anything until you sell anything.' I said, 'Well fine. You want to be my agent and not make anything.' I thought, 'Boy, is she dumb.'"
"You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'"
"I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private."
"People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy."
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