Quotes About Imagination

What you do in your dreams is never your choice.

Sure, there was no guarantee any of these things would actually happen as he envisioned. But maybe that wasn"t the point.It was the planning that counted, whether it ever came to fruition or not.

My dreams were dull as my everyday life.

In that distant, hopeful way unreal things can be.

And now she was found, no longer lost. Like a bag I'd given up for good suddenly reappearing in the middle of the night on my doorstep, packed for a journey I'd long ago forgotten. It was odd, considering I'd gotten accustomed to her being nowhere and anywhere, to finally know where my mother was. An exact location, pinpointed. Like she'd crossed over from my imagination, where I'd created a million different lives for her, back into this one.

I'll see you in Dreamland.

I'd just never really taken the time to picture it. It was like when you're a little kid and you run into your teacher or librarian at the grocery store or Wal-Mart and it's just so startling, because it never occurred to you they existed outside of school.

School was my solace, and studying let me escape, allowing me to live a thousand vicarious lives.

The specifics of what, exactly, these terms meant were never explained; as with any fantasy, vagueness was part of the appeal.

What would you do, if you could do anything?

And all that pink. It's like a giant vagina in there.

you draw (the painter)

It was like the time her sister suggested she read Emily Dickinson to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Once certain thoughts got into your head, you couldn't get rid of them.

qué parte de lo que quieres se puede conseguir sin alterar las leyes del espacio-tiempo?

Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she'd fly.

I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing.

No reading can be called a vice.

If I should have a daughter… I'm gonna paint the solar system on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say 'oh I know that like the back of my hand.

We build model ships in bottles, whispering life into the toothpicks and wire; we make plans and blueprints for the one we hope is coming. And come they do. Fleets of vessels. Battleships and barges. They arrive on the horizon, flags to the sky.

Then. I used to practice what I would look like when someone was falling in love with me.

It was a failure of my imagination that made me keep leaving people. All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings: moments to survive, record, and, once recorded, safely forget. I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things. Short tragic love stories that had once interested me no longer did. What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.

Sometimes a single sentence can be enough to fill the imagination completely. And sometimes a book's title is enough.

We like stories that are false and seem true (realist novels), that are true and seem false (true crime), that are false and seem false (dragons and superheroes), or that are true and seem true, but it's harder to agree on what that is.

How much of what they loved in her was real, and how much was fashioned from what they envisioned her to be?