Quotes About Imagination

Thinking about the world as it isn't, but might be or might have been, is called counterfactual thinking.

There is also an important distinction to be made between "upward" and "downward" counterfactuals. Upward counterfactuals are imagined states that are better than what actually happened, and downward counterfactuals are imagined states that are worse.

And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person's actual experience and an imagined alternative.

have seen that two of the factors affecting regret are Personal responsibility for the result How easily an individual can imagine a counterfactual, better alternative

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising.

I am new to playing but it has seemed to me like dreaming. The player is himself and another. When he looks at the others in the play he knows he is part of their dreaming just as they are part of his. From this come thoughts and words that outside the play he would not readily admit to his mind.

So far as we know, humans have always imagined there must be life beyond. Possibly, in part, that is because individual humans have always—as long as they have been able to think—known nothing other than existence, making it very difficult indeed to imagine a never-experienced state of nonexistence.

Girls are impressed by boys who can cook.

delight exceeds the possibilities envisioned by desire

I form withing myself the utopia of a subject free from repression

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie

But it was the first time I had ever really used the place I knew and the things I felt in a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhiliration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control.

Art consists of the persistence of memory.

So turn off the television—in fact, why don't you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair?—and we'll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

Before he said I was too old for stories." "A person's never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them." "Do you say so?" "I do.

The stories we hear in childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

Childhood itself is a myth for almost all of us. We think we remember what happens to us when we were kids, but we don't.

remember the simplest thing of all: how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

Where do I get my ideas? The more pertinent question is…how do I make them stop?

She takes my hand like a woman in a dream. She is in a dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief . . . but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.

He had an instinct for mischief in his head, just as some people have a way with numbers or a clear sense of direction.