Quotes About Imagination

need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nema told us that the son of one of his friends, a 10-year-old, had a week and his parents in whore telling them he has been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having a legal dreams.

Certain memories, like the imaginary balloons Yassi made with her delicate hands when she was happy, rise from somewhere in the depths of what we call memory. Like balloons, these memories are light and bright and irretrievable, despite the 'air sadness' (Bellow's term) surrounding them.

The Glories of the Possible are Ours.

It is so easy to invent, by mistake, not remember what was there, what is truly remembered?

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

More than anyone, this book is for those young people—an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don't settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

este libro es para esos jóvenes: una invitación a rehacer el mundo una vez más, y hacer realidad, a base de esfuerzo, determinación y una gran dosis de imaginación, unos Estados Unidos que por fin reflejen todo lo mejor que llevamos dentro.

But I did find refuge in books. The reading habit was my mother's doing, instilled early in my childhood—her go-to move anytime I complained of boredom, or when she couldn't afford to send me to the international school in Indonesia, or when I had to accompany her to the office because she didn't have a babysitter. Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

I was actually doing in my life. I was like a young Walter Mitty; a Don Quixote with no Sancho Panza.

Magic beans, baby. Magic beans.

And in that moment, I had the strongest wish to sit beside him and talk. To ask him where he'd found the strength and imagination to do so much with so very little. To ask how he'd recovered from disappointment.

I felt as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men.

No age, race, class, or body type appeared unrepresented. There was even one ancient-looking character dressed as Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, complete with a long white cloak, a pluming white beard, and a sturdy wooden staff on top of which he'd somehow managed to mount a small video monitor, looping a clip of my JJ Dinner speech.

In other words," she said, "you've got some magic beans in your pocket. That's what you're telling me. You have some magic beans, and you're going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and you'll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it?

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

What the imagination has made, the imagination can unmake.

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.