Quotes About Imagination

We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.

It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself, (...), and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief.

In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be.

Our relationship could now thrive only in my head, and to discuss it with a mother intent—admittedly in my own best interest—on challenging it with reality might do it irreparable harm.

They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities—New York, Rio, Shanghai, Paris—under their stains of stars, images as though from an epoch before electricity, but with the buildings of today. Whether they looked like the past, or the present, or the future, she couldn't decide.

depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself...

Princeton inspired in me the feeling that my life was a film in which I was the star and everything was possible

It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself.

In America, the murky, unknown places of the world are blank screens:

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's

Why don't you read a novel? There's more truth in fiction than in fact.

imagining her name in a record book. All those demure round letters in the first name, followed by the stalky surprise of the surname. Ona Vitkus.

I drew out the Ham, lingered on the me, and softened the clip of the rick. I repeated the word, and with every slow joining of its three syllables, the fizzy taste of sweet licorice with a mild chaser of wood smoke flooded my mouth. A phantom swig of Dr. Pepper.

it goes back to the garden telling a story. You make up bits and play with them to see if they ring true. Sometimes this works out first time and all is well and good, but as often as not you have to fiddle and reshape until it is right.

My list] of unwritten books grows longer every year--which may be a blessed relief to the book-buying public but is a source of real dissatisfaction to me.

We all have an idealised picture of the garden that we have carried around in our heads from the moment it became ours and which, I guess, is never the same as the growing reality. Over the years that the garden is coming into being that image carries you forward and inspires you, but when things reach maturity, the cold light of reality can be harsh.

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.

Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

A book is a work of art. (Again

2) Terms are connected in propositions. The elements of fiction are connected by the total scene or background against which they stand out in relief.

become at home in this imaginary world; know it as if you were an observer on the scene; become a member of its population, willing to befriend its characters, and able to participate in its happenings by sympathetic insight, as you would do in the actions and sufferings of a friend.

You have become acquainted with the characters. You have joined them in the imaginary world wherein they dwell, consented to the laws of their society, breathed its air, tasted its food, traveled its highways. Now you must follow them through their adventures.

don't criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience.

importance of letting an imaginative book work on you.