Quotes About Imagination

Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.

There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, "Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.

You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards -Secret Life of the Bees

We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?

Every time I shot back, What's wrong with living in a dream world? And she'd say, You have to wake up.

In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved me. I know this much: the mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.

You gotta imagine what's never been

Ah, but never underestimate the power of a dismissed dream. I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.

The aim of the novelist is not only to hold up a mirror to the world, but to imagine what's possible.

I sat at her desk and turned one page after another, staring at what looked like bits and pieces of black lace laid cross the paper.

It's my earliest memory: arranging my brother's marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time.

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.

An idea suddenly sat in my head, sunning itself

from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story? There are only speculative answers, but it seems plausible that Christianity and the Western world would have had a somewhat different religious and cultural inheritance. Perhaps women would have found more egalitarianism.

Yet from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story?

Must our imaginations be so feeble as that, Thomas? If the Union dies, as our old president says, it will be from lack of imagination… It will be from Southern hubris, and our love of wealth, and the brutality of our hearts!

there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls.

Everything is the proper stuff of fiction. —VIRGINIA WOOLF

The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.

the stethoscope in little David's ears. "Can you hear that?" I asked. "What do you suppose that is?" He frowned for a moment as if he were lost in the wonder of the strange tapping in his chest. Then he broke out in a grin and startled me by saying, "Is that Jesus knocking?

We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we?

Reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give