Quotes About Imagination

la poesía viene sola con todo lo que dejo a mi paso: flor o demonio, la poesía viene sola como un pájaro (de Amor, Ciudad Atribuída)

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

This is another lesson from the transformative movements of the past: all of them understood that the process of shifting cultural values—though somewhat ephemeral and difficult to quantify—was central to their work. And so they dreamed in public, showed humanity a better version of itself, modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible.

And the real surprise, for all involved, is that we are so much more than we have been told we are - that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined.

commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs

Would you believe it's harder to find a virgin than a unicorn in New York?

I tried to make him a young court-wizard in my mind—he almost looked the part in his fine clothes, pursuing some lovely noblewoman—and there my imagination stumbled. He was a thing of books and alembics to me, library and laboratory.

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I'm probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

All maps are fiction when the world is seen from the sky. But if ten thousand dragons choose to believe in this one, I think you will find it nearer truth than otherwise.

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I'd woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

I know i'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in my head I imagined them all a little like Kasia; that was how I thought of her. And I wasn't old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon.

But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I'd half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.

magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.

Mum told me she'd helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn't tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won't happen to you.

Do you think I will be able to breathe fire or spit poison?" Temeraire asked. "I am not sure how I could tell; I tried, but I only blew air.

Now come on. Let's find the baby unicorns and get out of here.

It's a grogler, you brainless cod! I yelled at him. No, it's a hyd-oh shit, it's a grogler, Orion said, and just stood there for a dazed, gaping moment.

each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn't been written yet, and in its place I'd inscribed one line with my own hand: And then they graduated from the Scholomance.

Yancy was the only name she used, and whenever a scruffier sort of wizard came to the commune looking for help, more often than not they said she'd sent them, with her respects. Once, I'd asked why, and Mum told me she'd helped her resolve a corruption of perception that had lodged itself too deep into her imagination. If that doesn't tell you much, just avoid consuming too many alchemical substances in unreal spaces and it won't happen to you.

I was seeing whispers and wind chimes — not solid wind chimes dangling, which would have been all right; I was seeing the sound of wind chimes, and don't ask me to describe it.

I felt as though I were pretending to be grown-up.

I would have thought only that the money must have come from a strongroom somewhere, a chest full of gold like a duke would have or a tsar. I wouldn't have thought of it coming from quiet men in plain coats who didn't ride in carriages.

high magic: magic that came only when you made some larger version of yourself with words and promises, and then stepped inside and somehow grew to fill it.

It looked as though someone had come through with a pump and inflated everything in the scene by thirty percent, highway and cars and all, before going away satisfied.