Quotes About Imagination

I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, "Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" "No, what?" I would say. "A piece of dust." Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, "So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that shaping force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning.

From another, distanced mind, I saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by two white clapboard walls, a mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box hedge, small as a doll in a doll's house.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. 'Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.' I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee's window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi's special red chalk.

can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?

Orice lucru în via?? e subiect de scris, dac? ai îndr?zneala s? o faci ÅŸi imaginaÅ£ie s? improvizezi. Cel mai mare duÅŸman al creativit??ii este îndoiala de sine.

I felt what the 19th century romantics must have felt: The extension of the soul into the realm of nature.

Rüya görüyoruz ve rüyalar?m iyileÅŸiyor

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. –

Try to get into a story. Forget self and give blood to creation.

As long as men have ideals, as long as they are vulnerable, there is this power to create a dream for them.

And another: perhaps a version of the waitress story: only I haven't got it here. Make it up. Naturalistic. Jewel prose. Make out little paragraphs of what happens to whom. Then think it clear. Write it.

You have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something.

Ho talmente riempito la mia riserva di giorni e maschere che adesso posso e devo passare gli anni a pescare, a tirar su mostri dagli occhi di perla, coriacei, squamosi e con barbe marine, sommersi da lungo tempo nel mar dei Sargassi della mia immaginazione.

I do not like to think of all the things, familiar, useful and worthy things, I have never put into a poem.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt....

We all live in our own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care.

I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new

On a wonderful thing—Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, And a naked mouth, red and awkward. For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

See each scene deep, love it like a complex faceted jewel. Get the light, shadow & vivid color. Set scene the night before. Sleep on it, write it in the morning.