Quotes About Imagination

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present.

I was glib, even witty, or at least that's how I imagined myself.

En mayor o menor medida, todos inventamos nuestro pasado.

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them.

A powerfully imagined event can evoke the same emotions as a real event. Few artists would contradict this, and yet there no doubt people who would find it odd that a fiction, when fully imagined, can create something parallel to the disruptions in madness, but what Freud called "sublimation" is the transformation of inner dramas, fears, and wounds into something else: a work of art outside the body of the artist.

I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.

I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

This was not some regular dame. No, this was a doll with high tastes, with ideas dancing in her head like fireflies.

I love clothes and have often pined for them - the beautiful dress or coat in the window. My desire is for the transformation I imagine will take place, a kind of enchantment of my own body.

He talks like me when I'm pretending." Matt deepened his voice, "Like this - I'm Spiderman." I stared down at Matthew. "Well, you're right, Matt," I said. "He is pretending." "But who is he pretending to be?" Matt asked. "Himself," I said.

but the fact is that New York is as much a myth as a place, and because we all participate in that fiction, we make it partly real.

Real New York and imaginary New York aren't easily separated. The stuff of a city isn't only material; it's spiritual as well.

She's still in love with you," Violet said. "I know." "Or maybe she's in love with the idea of me on the other side of the country.

all of us need a story outside ourselves, a form through which we imagine ourselves as players in the game.

we imagine ourselves as the other person will see us, mirroring our own desire in them, and most of what we do is borrowed from a vocabulary of familiar images.

the idea of "extension" makes sense to me because art and the world can't be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other, and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art if creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

I love being able to play as many different characters, in as many different worlds as I possibly can. That's what I really enjoy.

I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.