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Imagination Quotes
"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul."
17
"Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world."
17
"The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination."
17
"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant."
17
"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June."
17
"Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives."
17
"Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming."
17
"CALVIN:When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment."
17
"When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.)M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises..."
17
"The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality."
17
"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."
17
"She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable."
17
"Beautiful men and women with distorted shadows came and scorched their handprints onto doors before vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched the ground."
17
"Into the day as by dream I swim To the music of nourished meaning."
17
"Life's more science-fictiony by the day."
17
"You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced."
17
"Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and the world's problems.So said the snobs who did not know themselves as snobs."
16
"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."
16
"You know about witches, wizards. You can envision dragons, even if you presently think you are above believing in them. You doubt magic, but you have a word for it. Isn't that a strangeness that wears at you? All these things that you know all about, but you think you are above. Did you used to be able to shape the spell children use to find lost things in the grass? Did you always know to look at the sky, at stars, when you make your wishes? Who taught you the things your soul has always known?"
16
"All kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull ..."
16
"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..."
16
"My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men."
16
"Any cat may stare into a fire and see red mice play."
16
"Says, Rahula! Rahula! Face of Glory! Universe chawed and swallowed!"
16
"The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic."
16
"Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, 'No, I'm not interested.' I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: 'the book is so much better than the film."
16
"She lost touch with reality and was dragged into her imagination."
16
"And people who don't dream, who don't have any kind of imaginative life, they must they must go nuts. I can't imagine that."
16
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
16
"Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding."
16
"Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others."
16
"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."
16
"My sacred landscape is the foothills of the stars - I go there often to sleep ..."
16
"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
16
"Flight of my mind rises beneath the seagull's wings, then ocean is my motherland I feel."
16
"...she made her home in between the pages of books."
16
"I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall."
16
"It's delightful when your imaginations come true, isn't it?"
16
"I don't want to talk as much,' she said, denting her chin thoughtfully with her forefinger. 'It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures."
16
"At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me."
16
"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led."
16
"My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day."
16
"The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell."
16
"It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing."
16
"There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen."
16
"Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives."
16
"The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast."
15
"Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism."
15
"The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope."
15
"In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight."
15
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