Quotes About Imagination

He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.

Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, books had no real existence in our world. Like seeds in the beak of a bird waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. they lie dormant hoping for the chance to emerge.They want us to give them life.

Each man dreams his own heaven.

Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

Landscape is my mistress - t'is to her that I look for fame - and all that the warmth of the imagination renders dear to man

Painting is with me but another word for feeling.

Our opinion on palaeoart is that subtle references and hints of anatomical features are more realistic, more in line with what we see in living animals. Portrayed with style and in an appropriate setting, they can leave a more distinct effect on the viewer.

If the 'I' is understood strictly as we have been taking it, then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware; so it cannot 28depend on any of the things which I invent in my imagination.

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.

And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better.

their lives were full of quiet drama, full of vague yet thrilling signs that life was not as the common run supposed it to be; they were among those... who watch life as though it were a great drab curtain which they are sure is always about to rise on some terrific and exquisite spectacle, and though it never did quite rise, they were patient, and noted excitedly every small movement of it as the actors took their places, strained to hear the unimaginable setting being shifted.

Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.

Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty")

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning, whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of. Funny

One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")

they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying 'We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!' —Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

the snake's-hands in a story can be the best part.

girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through.

they slipped one by one again into the merely fictional – Hermes's false Egypt, and Bruno's false Hermes; Kraft's false Bruno; Pierce's false history of the world, the doors that had once blown open blowing closed again one by one down the corridor into the colored centuries.

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.

it is a Tale. Only it's longer and stranger than we imagine. Longer and stranger than we can imagine. So what you must do—" she opened her eyes "—what you must do, and what I must do, is forget.