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"Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination."
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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 Ishmael Reed

"I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year."

"I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor."

"That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer."

"I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch."
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