Quotes About Imagination

Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so many horizons, geological and human, where the evidence is missing or incomplete.

maybe we were the diggers of literature

The outsider never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of the West. The West never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of itself.

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bonesThe ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

There it was, word for word,The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

God and the imagination are one.

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

A poem is a meteor.