Quotes About Imagination

I think it will last," said Grandfather. "In my experience when people once begin to read they go on. They begin because they think they ought to and they go on because they must. Yes. They find it widens life. We're all greed for life, you know, and our short span of existence can't give us all that we hunger for, the time is too short and our capacity not large enough. But in books we experience all life vicariously.

Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.

Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.

Knyghtwood, though the gales had stripped away most of its leaves, had not lost its fascination for Ben and the twins. Indeed, its spell seemed deeper than before. The trees all had faces now, the twins said, and fingers and toes. They dug their toes in hard when the wind blew, and stretched up their arms to the sky, and pulled down the clouds with their long, grey fingers, and made purple cloaks out of them that they wrapped about their bare limbs when the night fell coldly.

Like all creators, he knew well that strange feeling of movement within the spirit, comparable only to the first movement of the child within the womb, which causes the victim to say perhaps with excitement, perhaps with exasperation or exhaustion, "There is a new poem, a new picture, a new symphony coming, heaven help me." The movement had been unusually strong when he first knew about this clock.

You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upwards to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

She can't quite bring herself to say more than that. And even when Jim had been alive and well, despite being happy and settled and everything else that came with a twenty-year marriage, it had been Aiden she'd thought about before falling asleep, Aiden she'd fantasised about when the mood took her.

I see a stranger on the street and suddenly his eyes are your eyes, his smile is your smile. I'm going crazy. Hallucinating. And it's all because of you.

To see things in surprising ways, you have to extend yourself a bit.

I've got lots of ambitions, but I only ever think of them when I'm lying around in my undies having a snooze.

Ganz allgemein sind mir Bücher inzwischen lieber als Menschen und Menschen in Büchern lieber als Menschen, die woanders sind.

How the alternative reduces one's prospect and petrifies the imagination in a way that the possibility can never do. Possibilities, innumerable and tightly packed, could shower forth like mushroom spore between such alternatives as being here, or there; alive, or dead; and old, or young.

Das war alles Teil ihrer Unfähigkeit, dieses 'für immer' zu begreifen. Sie konnte sich durchaus vorstellen, dass jemand fort war, das Schwierige war, zu erfassen, dass diese Person niemals wiederkehren würde.

Alone, without the looking-glass of another person's presence, the mirrors of the imagination sometimes effect cunning distortions. By

I ran my finger over the text, then held the book up to my face, closed my eyes, and inhaled the sweet-sour scent of old paper and binding glue. Did everyone who loved books do this when they encountered a new one?

All the best stories in the world were of escape.

How could the people around me not see that I'd been spending my day in nineteenth-century Kansas, or in the pit of a giant peach? It was like I was the only one living in the real world, and they were skating blindly over an opaque surface above me.

I remembered how it had been first learning to read, how the squiggles of print finally organized themselves slowly and painfully into words, then pieced together into sentences with meaning. Now, for the first time, the squiggles were releasing actual worlds... All of them surfacing from the page so real that when I finally closed my eyes, I was amazed their lives didn't continue around me. A whole world somehow tucked back into the book, waiting for me to set it free.

perhaps,thought Felix,that's what magic is--physics with a different twist to it. my world just hasn't discovered the twist.

Sometimes I think we only imagine ourselves. It's hard sometimes, coming face-to-face with your truer nature -- the part that you conceal, even from yourself.