Quotes About Imagination

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs--no regular hours, so many temptations!

The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eye.

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. This isolation, young love and hero worship accomplish without remorse; they hardly know tenderness.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.

I can't help thinking -- Suppose the world was made for happiness after all.

Some of my ideas get enlarged almost before I have them.

She never foresaw their marriage, its days and nights, other than as embowered by dazzling acres, blossoms a snowy blaze and with honeyed stamens, by sun then moonlight, till came later - fruited boughs bowed, voluptuous, to the ground, gumminess oozing from bloomy plums. She had been a DH Lawrence reader and a townswoman.

Wooed by a vivid cover, she picked one up and leafed through it. She loved thee way it smelled, the ink, the fine paper, the oversized photographs.

Inness painted from memory, which is to say that he didn't paint what he saw, but what he remembered. There's a difference. He believed memory was a lens to the soul. It's not the details that matter - the veins on a leaf, say- so much as the implied detail, such as the changing light, the wind, the lone peasant in the distance the sense that something else is going on, some deeper possibilitly ....

Words are precious things meant to create, to imagine, to dream with.

Every night she had fallen asleep dreaming about that kiss, and each kiss after.

We sat in silence, both of us looking up at the stars. He was probably envisioning a machine headed for Pluto. I wished i was on that machine.

I wonder why you see him and I hear him," Will said. "You hear him?" Ivy reached over and switched off the motor. "You hear him?" "So does Beth." Ivy's mouth dropped open. "She writes stories with messages that aren't hers. I draw angels I don't mean to draw.

For one thing, she hadn't exactly chosen a field; although she has since childhood imagined picking up her Oscar, the category has never been determined. There was some thought that by the time she grew up they would give out Oscars for Best Novel (and that by then she would have written one), or that maybe she would just get some kind of honorary Oscar for her distinctive life observations made in everyday conversations, or the occasional letter.

But the point is that I didn't want this book to depict events with any accuracy. I am a fan of whatever you want to call this category of fiction in which authors use their real names for their character names.

I could imagine it, I thought, but all I could ever do was imagine. I couldn't know. I couldn't feel that.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Someday she planned to paint he ceiling: Blue, with gold stars on it, whole constellations, and a section of the Milky Way.

What a pity every child couldn't learn to read under a willow tree...

She snatched at the dream that had comforted her for so long. It was faded and thin, like a letter too often read.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.