Quotes About Imagination

I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. "Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids' heads.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

I never put real people into my fiction -- I can't see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.

At lunch break [from cheesemaking] I checked out the wildly colorful powder room, where a quote from Alice in Wonderland was painted on the wall: There's no use in trying,' Alice said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.

A story is like a painting, Sóli. It doesn't have to look like what you see out the window.

But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths...hoping to get lost in a thicket.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind's eye and smell it with your mind's nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you're fairly young, I think, or else it's very difficult to read for pleasure later on.

The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.

Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he's a monster and goes to this island where it's all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus.

I am looking for the door to another world. I've waited thousands of years. Take me.

Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.

One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun. It's why I draw what I draw.

When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eight years later, waking someone like me in this house... or that you would finally show me hot to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me?

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life

Around this time I made my plan. Dangerous possibly, crazy for sure. All I can say is, you try living in crazytown for a while and see what you cook up.

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention