Quotes About Imagination

I tried to imagine her as the mother of a child, but simply could not. I felt sorry for any offspring she might produce.

But then I looked in the glass and saw the spy beyond the clergyman, the image beyond the image, and beyond the spy was yet another man, the image beyond the image beyond the image. Reality blurred; fantasy and truth became inextricably intertwined. I told myself I had imagined the distant stranger but as I felt my personality begin to divide I covered my face with my hands.

We always glamorize what we don't have

I had this vision of the two of us holding hands or getting into some light petting behind shower curtains or up in the fencing aisle or some shit.

She looked around and saw thousands of books in rows of shelves. There were posters on the wall and signs pointing to various sections. It was, well, a library. But when she turned to Jasper, she realized he saw something completely different. His gaze was slightly unfocused as if instead of books, he saw journeys and possibilities.

Everyone has a past, she reminded herself. If only she could have a good one. One that was exciting and involved pirates or space creatures.

Dear God. Brad the Dragon. I swear, if I ever meet that author, I'm going to strangle him with a Brad the Dragon stuffed animal, wrap him in a Brad the Dragon blanket and throw his body out to sea.

how much room it would take to build a giant vagina

How can you have a book for a friend?" Abby asked. "You can't talk to them." "No, but they can take you away to another place. With books, the world feels safe.

Everyone gets to have dreams. Not just you.

She hadn't wanted to make plain cinnamon cookies. She'd wanted to blend in ginger and try something fun like rosewater. She'd thought about going to the market and buying fresh spring vegetables, then making a red wine risotto with the crunchy, delicious vegetables served with a perfect roasted chicken stuffed with garlic and spices.

art was an important way to expand the mind. It wasn't about ability but being able to think in different ways. To have tangible proof that there are dozens of ways to solve a single problem.

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.