Quotes About Imagination

The murex Dr. Geffard keeps on his desk can entertain her for a half hour, the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it's a forest of spikes and caves and textures; it's a kingdom. Her

Então, crianças, como o cérebro, que vive sem uma centelha de luz, constrói para nós um mundo cheio de luz?

As she [Anna] sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for his boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.

Anthony Doerr

Se pelo menos a vida fosse como um romance de Júlio Verne... e você pudesse passar as páginas para a frente, quando precisasse, para descobrir o que estava para acontecer.

She clutches the sack. West, she thinks, this is all she knows, west where the sun goes down, west across the Propontis, and her mind sends up visions of the blessed island of Scheria, and of the bright oil and soft bread of Urbino, and of Aethon's city in the clouds, each paradise blurring into the last. It does exist, Aethon-the-fish told the wizard inside the whale. Otherwise what's it all been for?

Maybe in the old days men did walk the earth as beasts, and a city of birds floated in the heavens between the realms of men and gods. Or maybe, like all lunatics, the shepherd made his own truth, and so for him, true it was.

A fourteen-year-old girls sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. "And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it, and yet"—she taps the end of his nose—"it's true.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio K

On est très loin de comprendre ce que c'est d'être aveugle, quand on ferme les yeux.

to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe." The children lean forward. "And then?" "Behind the thirteenth door"—the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—"is the Sea of Flames." Puzzlement. Fidgeting. "Come now. You've never heard of the Sea of Flames?

The wizard laughed. "Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real." "Wrong," I said, "it does exist. Even if you don't believe in it, I do. Otherwise what's it all been for?

All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.

This snowy-haired dreamer plucked out of the soot.

Clouds like those," he'd show her, "are called cumulus congestus. Each one is riding along on a big column of slowly cooling air. Like a big invisible ice-cream cone. That small cloud there probably weighs five hundred thousand pounds." "Nooo," she'd say. "It's floating—it weighs nothing." Still, she would not look away.

Che cosa non ha fatto, la guerra, ai sognatori.

If it is a hallucination, let it be.

He sees enough in three weeks to provide ten lifetimes of nightmares.

But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.

How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It's the central challenge for every artist, Naima. Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?

To close your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.

I look up at John Paul's bedroom and think, If his bed is near the window, he can watch clouds soaring past the cupola - huge anvils of cumulus, pale and full of shoulders. The wind slowly tears them to shreds. Thin blades of light slip through and touch down everywhere.