Quotes About Imagination

I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?

A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.

I wonder what they think of me in their world of light, deaf to the broken patterns around them. I wonder what stories they have invented, to explain me when I cannot explain myself.

When you are in my dreams, you have a face, and I know that face to be yours, but no matter how true they are, dreams are not real, and I don't know whether my dreeming mind has ever succeeded in catching your red face.

Magic is all about metaphors.

I liked him better in the mirror. It was tempting and all too easy to imagine him happened there, furious, but unable to cause mischief.

Our minds have to translate magic into symbols we understand.

I dreamed about her long, snaky body and about her deep, drawling voice. The voice was the worst. I'd wake up at the ninth or tenth hour of the night, my heart banging in my chest, and I'd lie there holding my breath in case she called my name again.

the window. 'But that isn't possible.

When she was reading, she didn't just leave her own life behind, she stepped into someone else's.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be solitary and yet needs the widest outlook on the world.

And then we jumped off Mount Olympus and flew through the clouds and you held your knee to your chest because you skinned it on a sharp cloud and then we fell into a salty lake. Then I woke up and the window frightened me and I thought: Eurydice is dead. Then I thought—who is Eurydice? Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I? It scares me, Eurydice. Please come back.

Peter Pan is great in a book -- but in real life, people who don't grow up, they're a fucking nightmare.

But don't we need to cross over? Is this not a moral imperative for art, but also for social discourse? Don't we need to imagine people different from ourselves, people whose experiences we can only imagine?

Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. We begin in the present and end in the present, and in the middle is an accumulation of future possibilities

We need Harry Potter.

Put the bad poetry in the mouths of outlandish characters. It might make bad poetry funny instead of sad.

The imagination is a wonderful thing; it allows for all manner of undiscoverable sins.

In Wangechi Mutu's mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for "artist." The closest term is something like "magician" or "a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,

I like liars. Liars care enough to make the world a more interesting place than it actually is.

I talk about going to [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water'... the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.

Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?

Her eyes were still closed, and in the darkness, in her dark dress and coat, she seemed an assemblage of angular fragments...