Quotes About Imagination

I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen...

Now he knew: They were real. Who'd make up a thing like this? Okay, one of them was a cheese that rolled around of its own accord, but nobody was perfect.

What sort of person, said Salzella patiently, sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.

Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe? It was far more interesting and you didn't have to muck it out once a week.

Terry Pratchett

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

Twoflower didn't just look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles, Rincewind knew--he looked at it through a rose-tinted brain, too, and heard it through rose-tinted ears.

Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested.

Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything…

Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting.

And then she woke up and it was all a dream.' It was just about the worst ending you could have to any story.

You were safe on a troll. Anyone wanting to mug a troll would have to use a building on a stick.

He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

They say that the eyes of some paintings can follow you around the room, a fact that I doubt, but I am wondering whether some music can follow you for ever.

It was impossible for him to get bored. He just didn't have the imagination.

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

Funny, reely, he said. You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know.

I just think the world ought to be more sort of organized.' 'That's just fantasy,' said Twoflower. 'I know. That's the trouble.' Rincewind sighed again.

And he won her freedom by playing beautiful music,' Roland added. 'I think he played a lute. Or maybe it was a lyre.' 'Ach, weel, that'll suit us fine,' said Daft Wullie. 'We're experts at lootin' an' then lyin' aboot it.

You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you? Only a man would think of that. It's our job, said Moist. If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.

The children refused to disbelieve in the monsters because, frankly, they knew damn well the things were there. But she'd found that they could, very firmly, also believe in the poker.