Quotes About Imagination

There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies.

I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.

We are creatures of story, and the process of changing one mind or the whole world must begin with 'Once upon a time.'

MOST OF US have harbored a fantasy wherein we return to confront a lost first love, and, in that reunion, we have become better looking, thinner, richer, utterly desirable— so desirable that our lost love realizes instantly that he has made a terrible mistake.

Il n'est rien de réel que le rêve et l'amour.

Though I have had no adventures, I feel capable of them.

I had feared to be presumptuous; of building up a fairyland out of dreams; of yielding to my imagination rather than to my good sense. And yet, deep down in some inner consciousness, a faint insidious hope had whispered to itself that if I showed myself worthy, perhaps-perhaps- And now perhaps had become reality, and all doubt and mistrust a vanished dream.

I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives. [ Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit and bright , Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel. Or maybe they just help me while away the hours as the rain pounds down on the porch roof, taking me away from the gloom and on to somewhere sunny, somewhere else.

It's hard to imagine yourself in the future. It's why people do so many dumb things, because they're mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.

You may admire, even love those photographs, but you don't look at them and think What happened next? They have an immutable quality - that's their strength and power. But there's no question embedded in them. There's a question embedded in all your work, that sense of 'what happens next.

There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.

The being happy. It's so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you're missing, or what you imagine you're missing. It's so much more peaceful.