Quotes About Imagination

While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

A godo 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...

I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.

Every Man has the Right to make a Kite from his Pants.

How strange that a boy could make a kite of his pants, fly them around the world, and somehow arrive back at the house where everything began.

I'd give anything to have stayed home. If wishes were horses, like they say. We'd all have different shit to shovel.

After that I had a new brain-Lysol to calm myself down: walking in the woods with Emmy. I'd picture us holding hands, maybe with our own dog. Being grown-ups. It would be so much safer than being a kid.

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.

What I'm saying is . . . What am I saying?" She tilted her head, the loopy earrings danced. "Okay, I like helping kids learn to see what they're looking at. But really and truly? I always hoped one day a spark would come along, that I could fan into a flame. Some whole new vision that the world actually needs.

The devil here is a boy with too much imagination," he usually said.

Enrique felt a successful man needed no imagination at all.

He] has about one idea in a year, and gets so worn out from it he has to go lie down.

They both went quiet, imagining a river of irises. Thatcher lay watching the sky through the leaves, white clouds skipping across small lenses of light. Here was a world, where he'd asked for nothing. He would escape with his life before the dust had settled on the collapse of his falling house.

Picture a single imaginary plant, bearing throughout one season all the different vegetables we harvest…we'll call it a vegetannual.

A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air. Which helps you feel less like a person-shaped invisible kid.

Sometimes, in his nightmares, everything on this desk sings at once. He comes back

sweet orange Jaune Flammes, which are just the right size to slice in half, sprinkle with salt and thyme, and bake for several hours until they resemble cow flops (the recipe says "shoes," if you prefer).

I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world. Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that. Humans have always needed story. Fiction isn't entertainment, it's a cultural nutrient. We need it, and we will always need it. (from her talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on 11/10/12)

I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

There he'd found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.

she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

I love it for what it tells me about life. I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is, If it can tell me something I didn't already know, or maybe suspected but never framed quite that way, or never before had sock me so divinely in the solar plexus, that was a story worth a read.

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.

The first time I went in, he didn't notice me because of reading a book. Not regular reading, I mean gone. He and that big book were not in this house, nor maybe this world.