Quotes About Imagination

Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here Let's stop there. I intend to get out

The leader had a beard and was wearing a caftan that looked as if it had been sewn by elves on hash.

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

I thought of myself as an itinerant brain--the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.

All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large...

Becka said that writing was almost the same as that—each letter was like a picture or a row of stitching, and it was also like a musical note; you just had to learn how to form the letters, and then how to attach them together

China does not exist. Nevertheless, she longs to be there.

on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream.

In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.

Maybe acting as if she believes in such a future will help to create it, which is the kind of thing the Gardeners used to say.

The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women's underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine – they're fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It's comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once.

She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You're free to reinvent yourself at will.

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen.

Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.

Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally.

He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Fool, he tells himself. She's not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can't resign himself.

But if its a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone.

You want to go back to where the sky was inside us

When the slugs begin to talk there's no time to lose.

Around the age of seven I wrote a play. The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist; the punishment was being squashed to death by the moon.  ...This play was not a raging success. As I recall, my brother and his pals came in and laughed at it, thus giving me an early experience of literary criticism.