Quotes About Imagination

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.

But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.

All night the dark buds of dreams open richly. In the center of every petal is a letter, and you imagine if you could only remember and string them all together they would spell the answer.

Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.

What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

The World I Live In I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what's wrong with Maybe? You wouldn't believe what once or twice I have seen. I'll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

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.

how the cold makes us dream!

One learns thinking about writing, and by talking about writing—but primarily through writing.

Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that 'writer's block' is a high-priority subject.

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether.

I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs.

Discussing free verse if like talking about an iceberg, a shining object that is mostly underwater.

To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.

I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.

Certainly imagery can be gleaned from the industrial world — what do Blake's dark Satanic Mills, for example, owe to the natural world? The city can be, and has been, the source of firm poetic description, and imagery too. But the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination

I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memoy. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?

When one writes the last apple on the tree, or the one small peach as pink as dawn, one is beginning to deal with particulars - to develop texture... Such texture is vital to all poetry. It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than mere statement.

He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.

I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what's wrong with Maybe?