Quotes About Imagination

When you do your research write down whatever interests you. Whatever stimulates your imagination. Whatever seems important. A story is built like a stone wall. Not all the stones will fit. Some will have to be discarded. Some broken and reshaped. When you finish the wall it may not look exactly like the wall you envisioned, but it will keep the livestock in and the predators out. (pg. 144)

Inspiration doesn't make writings, writings make inspiration.

Eneren, lyngens mor, er mitt tre. Den trenger ingen sommer, bare regn og sne. Fillet krone den løfter, ingen har hørt dens sus. Den har en lang, seig rot som kan gro av grus. Den bærer vind over skuldrene, skyene i sitt hår. Den kan stå i stormen. Knelende. Men den står. Kanskje den har en drøm i sindet: Det hvite ranunkel-bed der verden slutter og breene kommer ned. Av alle trær på jorden nærmest den store sne, breenes blinde sol. Å, var jeg som det.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

It's a wonder that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

Reading transports me. I can go anywhere and never leave my chair. It lets me shake hands with new ideas.

Myth is mecessary because reality is so much larger than rationality.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

Bertrand Russell writes that the painful thing "about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.

In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which the human animal is heir. "Present dangers are less than future imaginings," as Shakespeare puts it; and people have been known to leap out of a lifeboat and drown rather than face the greater agony of continual doubt and uncertainty, never knowing whether they will be rescued or not.

Absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved, and so on, are used commonly to describe the state of the artist or scientist when creating or even the child at play. By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.

Since when one has started dreaming, there were so many cries for help and so many bottles thrown into the sea, that it is amazing we still can see the sea when we should see only bottles.

L'amour, tu sais, ce dont il a le plus besoin, c'est l'imagination. Il faut que chacun invente l'autre avec toute son imagination, avec toutes ses forces et qu'il ne cède pas un pouce du terrain à la réalité ; alors, là, lorsque deux imaginations se rencontrent… Il n'y a rien de plus beau.

distance and imagination which is almost always indispensable to the birth of legends.

E così della propria vita, delle proprie idee e dei propri sogni si fanno… degli aquiloni.»

Non vale la pena di vivere nulla che non sia un'opera d'immaginazione, sennò il mare sarebbe soltanto acqua salata…»

Ma i sognatori non erano ben visti; il sogno e la ribellione sono sempre andati a braccetto.

Rien ne vaut la peine d'être vécu qui n'est pas d'abord une oeuvre d'imagination, ou alors la mer ne serait plus que de l'eau salée...

Non so se sia un uccello, una farfalla o una lucertola, perché la fantasia infantile si era guardata bene dal privarlo di tutte le sue possibilità.

All that was still needed was genuine inspiration, a flash of pure poetry that would make all the difference between an elaborate, overcomplicated and clumsy effort and the simplicity of beauty.

I battled my feelings of inferiority bravely, picking out a guest and imagining him floating in the air at the end of a line I held in my hand, with his stiff-legged trousers, his checked vest, and his yellow tie, propelled this way or that with a flick of my hand. It was the first time I had wielded my imagination as a weapon of defense, and nothing ever turned out to be more beneficial to me in this life.

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.