Quotes About Imagination

Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

No existe el futuro sin el pasado, porque lo que va a suceder no se puede imaginar más como una forma de repetición.

the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.

Es imposible adivinar el final de una historia mientras la estás viviendo; carece de contornos y se constituye como una serie de palabras y datos incipientes y, para ser sinceros, nunca recuperamos toda la información de aquello que fue.

All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.' 'Don't you have a photograph?' 'Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

All wishes, however wrongheaded, however great or noble or ephemeral, must have an object, and that object is usually more ideal than real.

I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element - the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

The truth is that the world and our fantasies often overlap.

The secret to creativity is not in the so-called higher cognitive processes but in the dreamlike reconfigurations of emotional meanings that take place unconsciously

This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.

The page can resurrect what's lost and what's dead, what's not there anymore and what was never there.