Quotes About Imagination

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it. -from The Swan

The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.

Do you think the wren ever dreams of a better house?

A poem should always have birds in it.

Starlings in Winter I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

There are as many worlds as there are imaginers. - The Boat (in "Winter Hours")

I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility

A Voice from I Don't Know Where

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

Try to find the right place for yourself. If you can't find it, at least dream of it.

only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer's subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

ON THE BEACH On the beach, at dawn: four small stones clearly hugging each other. How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make and who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business? When the sun broke it poured willingly its light over the stones that did not move, not at all, just as, to its always generous term, it shed its light on me, my own body that loves, equally, to hug another body.

How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination.

Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. Poem: The Ponds

Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. Anyway, Blake the hosier's son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city— turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.