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"My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie...."
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"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."

"Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child's bed."

"How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."

"Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere."

"Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company."

"Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment."

"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality."
Explore more quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of voice, but out of chaos."

"But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be - a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself."

"No, no, I will not live among the wild scenes of nature, the enemy of all that lives. I will seek the towns-Rome, the capital of the world, the crown of man's achievements. Among its storied streets, hallowed ruins, and stupendous remains of human exertion, I shall not, as here, find every thing forgetful of man; trampling on his memory, defacing his works, proclaiming from hill to hill, and vale to vale,-by the torrents freed from the boundaries which he imposed-by the vegetation liberated from the laws which he enforced-by his habitation abandoned to mildew and weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever."

"I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw everyday and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever - that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. (...) The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished."

"I spoke of my desire of finding a friend, of my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot, and expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness who did not enjoy this blessing."

"Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind."

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."

"A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study."
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