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"The great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open."
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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 Herman Melville

"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it."

"Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds."

"In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans."

"For it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown."

"There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If."

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?"

"Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister."

"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers."
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