Quotes About Imagination

I look at the centerfold spread over the top of my toilet's water tank. She's got dark hair and blue eyes, and her legs are long. They always look like that, the women in the pictures Hugh brings.

Keep thinking those thoughts

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

I think I made you up inside my head.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) --from Mad Girl's Love Song: A Villanelle, written 1954

we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. --from Tale of A Tub, written 1956

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. [I think I made you up inside my head.]

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.

In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. --from Tale of a Tub, written 1956

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.

This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, Kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.