Quotes About Imagination

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming

Sometimes I went out into the cornfield and walked between the rows with my eyes closed, pretending I was blind, feeling the stalks reaching out to brush me like a pat on the back.

She wants to be someone else, somewhere else, and I can't blame her.

No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit.

But this gives no proper idea of my feelings at all; and no one that has not lived such a retired stationary life as mine, can possibly imagine what they were: hardly even if he has known what it is to awake some morning, and find himself in Port Nelson, in New Zealand, with a world of waters between himself and all that knew him.

When we hear a little good and no harm of a person, it is easy and pleasant to imagine more:

Reading is my favorite occupation. When I have leisure for it and books to read.

I am determined not to consent until I know for certain whether my aunt's opinion of him or mine is nearest the truth; for if mine is altogether wrong, it is not he that I love; it is a creature of my own imagination.

This, at least, is the hope that I cherish, the fancy that lights me on my lonely way.

Never a new idea or stirring thought came to me from without; and such as rose within me were, for the most part, miserably crushed at once, or doomed to sicken or fade away, because they could not see the light.

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

T]here is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child.

A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.

our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.

One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about Treasure Island. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -- toasted mostly. I repeated the last two words over and over again, like a mantra. Toasted, mostly. Toasted mostly.

He would surely have agreed that we were alike where it really counted: we were both hard-core devotees of what I call You-Are-There Reading, the practice of reading books in the places they describe.

I want be a writer

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

Quienes no escriben no saben lo bonito que es escribir. Antes siempre me lamentaba por no saber dibujar...

But I don't think building sand castles in the air is such a terrible thing to do, as long as you don't take it too seriously.

It's not imagination on my part when I say that to look up at the sky, the clouds, the moon, and the stars make me calm and patient. It's a better medicine than either valerian or bromine; Mother nature makes me humble and prepared to face every blow courageously.