Quotes About Imagination

If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood but to escape being misunderstood; but where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

No man can lie FOR God, however he may try it, for God is lovelier than all the imaginations of all his creatures can think.

George MacDonald

Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them—and as one day we must always see them, only far better—should we ever know dullness? Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might learn through the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for deliverance from ennui , from any haunting discomfort? Should we not just open our own child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be consoled?

By God, I wish that spit had been a real one, with me to turn it.

What is life about, Dr. Watson, if it is not about literature? To my mind, all else is a distraction. I should happily idle away the rest of my days in the company of a good book.

Herein, too, lies a despicable certainty: the galaxy is rife with terror. It crowds the shadows, lurks at the threshold, watches from behind every half-closed door. The dark side is ever present, waiting to tempt the unwary, to make monsters of the benign, to twist the bright spark of the imagination toward fear. Yes, the ways of the dark side are insidious indeed, but they are not unknown—not if you know where to look. Or should that be . . . where not to look?

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:

Reality is inside the skull.

Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one.

And yet all the while there's that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can't long when you're grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you're doing you could go on for ever.

It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.

Ist ihnen schon mal der Gedanke gekommen', sagte er, 'daß die ganze Entwicklung der englischen Dichtkunst dadurch beeinflußt wurde, dass die englische Sprache nicht genug Reime aufweist?' Nein, dieser Gedanke war Winston wirklich noch nie in den Sinn gekommen. Auch erschien er ihm unter den waltenden Umständen weder sonderlich wichtig noch interessant.

T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.