Quotes About Imagination

She and David had a running joke about how they both feared their kids at night the same way that, as children, they'd feared monsters under the bed. Beasts that would rise up from the side of your bed, seize you with sharp nails and demand things of you.

Sometimes when she woke from a flabbergasting dream Liz would lie very still to see if she could net it before it fled; perfectly still, eyes closed, not moving her head, as if the slightest shift would tip the story-bearing liquid, break its fragile meniscus and spill the night's elusive catch.

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: It's there.

It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.

I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: 'It's there.' Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.

And for at least that moment, I wouldn't have traded the hundreds of books I've read for the few I know almost by heart.

You make something from things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

What doesn't exist you have to create yourself. Even a dream can be plucked out of your head and shaped for a purpose.

We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.

Nos quejamos de lo mal que están las cosas, pero yo a veces me pregunto si no están ya mucho peor de lo que nos imaginamos

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.

Recalling the dream was like trying to follow a ship into fog.

Siempre me reafirmaba en la idea de que el ser humano es un ser narrante. Más Homo narrans que Homo sapiens.

Mitä voikaan tapahtua maailmassa, jossa kaiken väitetään olevan mahdollista?

But dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality.

Träume können ihren Wert haben, selbst wenn man sie nicht verwirklichen kann.

You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to.

There's no such thing as a murderer's face," he said. "You imagine something: a profile, a hairline, a set of the jaw. But it never matches up.

La plupart des voyages dont on rêve n'ont jamais lieu. Ou alors on les accomplit intérieurement. L'avantage, quand on emprunte ces vols intérieurs, c'est qu'on a de la place pour les jambes.

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

Time is invention and nothing else.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.