Quotes About Imagination

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

Give me a map and I'll build you a city.

We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

As always, books are mystical creatures to him.

Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.

The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings

the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span. But this time the thief wished that he had owned the name earlier in his life. He spent the first day imagining moments from his past when he could have been 'Astolphe,' when he might have behaved and participated with more ease and subtlety just for having the epaulette of such a name.

That there was nothing more assuring than a mask. Under the mask she could rewrite herself into any place, in any form.

A writer's mind must never be closed. It's his duty to be curious and my duty to feed the curiosity. Think of it as the start of a big adventure.

But I'm a nostalgic with a fascination for the future.

Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.

Memory is the enemy of wonder

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.

Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

There is another word for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is wonder.

If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.

The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.