Quotes About Imagination

Rather, a reader's imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it's over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.

But the point is this: stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems. And they don't have to stick to genre. Poems can learn from plays, songs from novels.

You can't create stories in a vacuum.

reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

Literature has its own logic; it is not life. Not only that, but (and this is key): characters are not people... and we forget that at our peril.

On one level, everyone who writes anything knows pure originality is impossible. Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before.

Your reading should be fun. We only call them literary works. Really, though, it's all a form of play. So play, Dear Reader, play. And fare thee well.

This is based on no science, pseudo of otherwise, but I firmly believe that the elapsed time between the development of language and creation of the first poem was about five minutes.

I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.

Poetry is thoughts that breath and words that burn.

In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

She's brim full of poetry - actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what paper-poets only write...

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.

Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience...

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.

If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.

A little stimulated at not finding her ready and waiting - so fanciful are men! - he hastened on...