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"Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world."
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Exlpore more Imagination quotes
"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."
"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."
"A tree house, to me, is the most royal palace in the world."
"I have spoken of Jonah, and of the story of him and the whale. - A fit story for ridicule, if it was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to try what credulity could swallow; for, if it could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."
"The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried."
"I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way."
"For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?"
"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."
"The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
"We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it."
"It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale."
"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."
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