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Imagination Quotes
"I wanted stories, and I wanted them always, and I wanted the experience that only fiction could give me: I wanted to be inside them."
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"His home was populated by things and creatures from Niall Lynch's dreams, and his mother was just another one of them."
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"No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."
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"Nothin' wrong with havin' a cat in the house. They can see what most people can't, like the folks in the Otherworld when they cross back over - the good ones and the bad. And they get rid a mice."
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"That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You're both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds."
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"Look at me!" he would shout as he ran laughing through the halls of Storm's End. "Look at me, I'm a dragon," or "Look at me, I'm a wizard," or "Look at me, look at me, I'm the rain."
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"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."
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"...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."
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"To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves."
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"I don't wear armor. I don't carry weapons. An emperor needs only his imagination."
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"Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak in which--the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket--Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded."
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"Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head."
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"My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me."
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"You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams."
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"Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?"
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"I memorized all of "John Carter and "Tarzan, and sat on my grandparents' front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home! I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities."
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"I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way."
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"Dreams are ideas where the collar has been removed and the leash has been thrown away."
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"Lovely thoughts came flying to meet me like birds. They weren't my thoughts. I couldn't think anything half so exquisite. They came from somewhere."
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"The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom."
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"The good news is that God gave us imaginations because he wanted us to take a tour into our future, see what's there for us and then we prepare to relocate into it!"
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"For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme for the universe... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and nightmares of non-logical dreamers."
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"I'm the idea of the human imagination, which, when you think about it, is the only thing we can really be certain ISN'T imaginary."
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"The human mind's innate ability to imagine and create ensures that we never remain stalled out in who we are. We constantly seek to amend our circumference and circumstances, craft and redraft our emotional, social, political, economic, and artistic being."
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"Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company."
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"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me."
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"Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future."
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"Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them."
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"It is always imagined before it is lived. In the world of thought, imaginations are lives, but people kill them before they grow to have life!"
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"And who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute, akin to weakness, perhaps partaking of frenzy - a disease rather than a gift of the mind?Probably all think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not feel. All illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and would not give it for gold."
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"Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."
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"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
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"Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own."
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"It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head."
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"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
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"By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream."
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"Just as heart is a fountain of unspoken words,the universe is a womb of wonder weird worlds."
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"If coffee were like dreams, then I would be wired in constant bliss, never needing sleep to live out my dreams."
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"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."
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"I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree."
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"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination."
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"They were waiting for me in the books and in stories, after all, hiding inside the twenty six characters and a handful of punctuation marks. These letters and words, when placed in the right order, would conjure all manner of exotic beasts and people from the shadows, would reveal the motives and minds of insects and of cats. They were spells, spelled with words to make worlds, waiting for me, in the pages of books."
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"Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much."
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"Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing."
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"What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk."
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"Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle's edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doing the same. What would that Africa be now? All I can think of is the other okapi, the one they used to believe in. A unicorn that could look you in the eye."
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"The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies."
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"Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking 'muck' across the floor of fact."
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"Have you ever been approached by a grim-looking man, carrying a naked sword with a blade about ten miles long in his hand, in the middle of the night, beneath the stars on the shores of Lake Michigan? If you have, seek professional help. If you have not, then believe you me, it can scare the bejeezus out of you."
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