Quotes About Imagination

And I imagined that I was in a race against time, a race in which the writer always lagged behind. While, in fact, the letters were rapidly lining up next to one another, asserting themselves, the vision fled, and writing was destined to a frustrating approximation. It was too slow to capture the brain wave.

Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practise with calm, wary pleasure. But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I's — many — outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I'm afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won't necessarily know how to get back.

You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.

No se imaginen cosas que no existen, que no van a acabar bien

Hábleles de tú a las estrellas.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues rompe una nuez: -Así es tu cerebro, Leonora. -No, el mío va mucho más lejos, perfora la bóveda celeste. Poseer un telescopio sin su otra mitad esencial, el microscopio, es un símbolo de la más negra incomprensión. La tarea del ojo derecho es ver en telescopio mientras el ojo izquierdo se asoma al microscopio.

Lo descubrí hace mucho al observar en el piso una tabla de madera, colocarle una hoja encima y tallar hasta que el grano de madera se convierta en la superficie del mar. Vi los nudos y quise conservar lo que me decía la madera, su paisaje, su poesía entrañable, su sexo.

Todos estamos tan llenos de retratos interiores, tan llenos de paisajes no vividos.

Una noche la soñé y tal como la soñé amaneció frente a mi puerta.

Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.

The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

That's what I always tell myself when I'm being fact-checked, and some detail I was attached to turns out not to be true. I'm initially disappointed, and maybe discouraged that now there's more work for me to do, but I know that 99.9% of the time there's actually something there, in the truth, that's more interesting than whatever I or anyone else can make up.

Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces.

Trying to explain all the steps was boring and exhausting. I kept imagining Ivan getting bored, or not believing me, and it kept sounding like I was putting the blame on other people, like Svetlana and her mom. When I tried to put the blame on myself, it was also tedious and boring, and in the end I gave up trying to explain anything.

But you aren't really looking!" she exclaimed. "You are—" She flipped through her dictionary. "Wool, gathering!" "That's true," I said. "I am woolgathering." "You are thinking about your friend," she said. "That's why you don't want to listen to me." "But Rózsa. Don't you ever like to . . . to do woolgathering?" "No! I am not a dreamer.

How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things? If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. On the other hand, why couldn't Rumi have said that?

I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.

I couldn't imagine what it would mean for an angle to be impossible to trisect. If a thing existed, couldn't you cut it in three? The professor started sketching diagrams and equations on the board. I copied everything in my notebook. Ivan was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was a ragged spot in his jeans just below the knee. It made a much stronger impression on me than the proof about angles.

the way you feel annoyed toward someone in real life after they say something mean to you in a dream.

I just can't imagine it. I can't imagine you on the other side of the world, at a pay phone on the street.