Quotes About Imagination

Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm

Sometimes she wore Levi's with white-suede fringe sewn down the legs and a feathered Indian headdress, sometimes old fifties' taffeta dresses covered with poetry written in glitter, or dresses made of kids' sheets printed with pink piglets or Disney characters.

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn't it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn't playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

So Witch Baby played. Tossing her head, sucking in her cheeks and popping up with the impact of each beat. Thrusting her whole body into the music and thrusting the music into the air around her. She imagined that her drums were planets and the music was all the voices of growth and light and life joined together and traveling the universe.

My reading and studying and retellings of old stories didn't do anything except help me think better. I was at least thoughtful. Too thoughtful, my friends said. And all I thought about was myths and old paintings that made me feel drunk on wine or struck my lightning but didn't matter to most people.

The fairy who was not old, not young, who was red roses, white snowfall, who was blind and saw everything, who sent stories resounding through the universe said, You much reach inside yourself where I live like a story, not old, not young, laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

What are you going to do if you find art, Pen? You going to steal some and put it in the van? I'm going to remember. When there was art.

I said I was an English major, that I wanted to write someday, that I read the way other people ate chocolate.

We no longer believe in fairy tales. But we will learn to believe in monsters.

Spun sugar clouds and extraterrestrial crystal vintage T-birds flying through space, morning-glory girls swinging from star-hung vines in cosmic gardens.

When you look at pain as material it makes all the difference in the world. I thought, the pain that is too big to be eased by its use as material would be a pain I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) even imagine.

You have to imagine things before you can do them. Stories help us see.

Writing was my religion, my foremost purpose in life, my consolation. But as the years passed and I didn't have the successes that others deemed the qualifications of a "real" writer, I went into hiding. I wrote, but I lost the strength of my words. I wrote, but with a doubt that needled each sentence, a lack of self-confidence that clouded my imagination. My boldness evaporated. My verve started to become a distant memory. I lost my truth.

I close my eyes. I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words.

Barbie was no longer afraid of anything. It was like the thing Mab had said about belief. The belief is sometimes the biggest part of it all. You can choose to believe in your published book being held in the loving hands of strangers, your name tattooed forever on the heart of the one you adore; you can choose to believe in tiny red-haired pesky piskies--all the things 'they' may tell you not to believe in. But who are they anyway? What do they know? What makes them any more real?

That must have been a ballroom once," she said, as she glanced back at the conference–cum–dining room. For an instant she could imagine it: Women dressed like Anna Karenina. Hussars and diplomats. Candlelight softening the lines on their faces. "And this used to be a garden," Michael added. "Like Stalin's world used to be Russia. It's only going to get drabber.

She imagined herself whirling breathlessly beneath the flashing lights of some impossibly chic Manhattan disco. Suddenly, a hand touches her arm. She turns. 'Pardon me,' Mick Jagger says, 'I believe this next dance is mine.

Imagine a world full of Elizabeth Wakefields,' Lila said. 'Could you imagine a duller, more predictable place? I think I'd go crazy.

If you turned sideways and stuck your tongue out, you could probably pass for a zipper.

I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.

Literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.

words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Along with preadolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there: