Quotes About Imagination

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." ? Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it.

But Douglas was a genius, because he saw the world differently, and more importantly, he could communicate the world he saw. Also, once you'd seen it his way you could never go back.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with his feet up by the fire one evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds, and thinking probably Essex.

Good writers don't moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful.

Nothing within the limits of the human imagination and mind is impossible. If it were, we could not imagine it or dream it.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

Hasn't it been a long time since you had a flying dream?

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.

I think there is a Paris inside us all.

Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.

And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then—that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I'd be able to. It was like you had the world inside you.

Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud..." ...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head? It's certainly not my own, said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim. Then whose it?

There's something fun about Sharpies that's really hard to articulate.

When hit with a genius idea, people tend to say, Well, if I sat down in a chair and really thought about it, I could have had that genius idea, too. But they didn't--and even if they'd wanted to, it could never have happened.

Wade tried to imagine Florida before the advent of man, but couldn't. The landscape seemed too thoroughly colonized -- the trailers, factory outlets, and cocktail shacks of the world below. He decided that if human beings took over the moon, they'd probably just turn it into Florida.

My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and i have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. my brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

Next book. It's embryonic in my head, but it's conceived. I don't want to discuss it for fear of screwing up the zygote.

And that's the day I became an artist. Nobody blames an artist for noticing stuff.

She picked up the book she was reading, Beyond the Ice Limit, found her dog-eared place at the beginning of chapter six, and began to read. The sea horizon lay against the sky, blue against perfect blue, and it seemed to beckon the ship southward, ever southward. She closed the book, put it down again. Not bad, but it lacked the punch of the original.

I have my books. I don't live in the actual world.