Quotes About Imagination

Allein schon das Wissen, dass einen am Ende eines langen Tages ein gutes Buch erwartet, macht diesen Tag zu einem glücklicheren.«

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. [Allein schon das Wissen, dass einen am Ende eines langen Tages ein gutes Buch erwartet, macht diesen Tag zu einem glücklicheren.]

Books were the one way Clara could wander, so she was more than happy to spend her morning with the Black Knight and legendary outlaws of the forest.

Put your nose in a book. That's the best thing for you.

Clara became so immersed in her "made-up" life that she almost began to believe she was the smart, strong, kind girl beloved by classmates who ran here and there boldly and with complete freedom. Then the clock tower struck eight o'clock and broke the spell.

Pretty, mysterious girl with braids … The depiction thrilled her. To be seen, to be described—it was as if the plain girl she always saw in the mirror might be magically transformed by the simple act of being observed by others. Pretty? Mysterious? What else might Clara be?

The rear door was black, the driver's side door was red, and the hood was sunshine-yellow. If Henry Ford and Picasso had gone out on a bender, that car was what the hangover would have looked like.

Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there

Those fields of childhood, tall Meadow-grass and flowers small, The elm whose dusky leaves Patterned the sky with dreams innumerable And labyrinthine vein and vine And wandering tendrils green, Have grown a seed so small A single thought contains them all

My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

Love is self-serving – we do all sorts of things for our own comfort and call it love. But revenge is an intimate thing, don't you think? Would you be willing to enact another person's vengeance?' It was a disturbing manifestation of devotion; one that seeded itself uncomfortably in Grace's imagination.

If you can capture a woman's imagination, then you will have her. But imagination is a strange creature. It needs time and distance to function properly.

He was in love with aspects of her. Andre wasn't capable of expressing himself like other people. He dreamt in smells, he heard music in colours.

She'd always heard that Paris was elegant but hasd struggled to imagine how. She'd assumed it would be rigid; the demanding intolerance of perfection. But...she was struck by the easy naturalness of everything.

Turner watercolour

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.

I want to live a lot of different lives, not just one. I wish I could have lived forever, in every age and every country, seen everything and done everything and felt everything." p. 193

What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of art is not to make us laugh or cry, not to arouse our lust or rage, but to do what nature does — to set us dreaming," said Gustave Flaubert.

History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It's not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It's what comes before history that isn't boring.

Kabir I recently came across: "…just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things, and stand firm in that which you are.

I don't go to graduate school. Instead, I move to New York, the city where I naively imagine writers must go.

I have to write. It's not an option. When I write, I am literally building myself a place in which to live. Once I'm firmly established within the narrative I pop awake in the morning and it's the first thing I think about. Not in an analytical way, as in "Oh, I haven't really reached the crisis point and it's already page 200—I'd better work on that." It's very much just running towards and into the place I most want to be.

And if you can't imagine, nothing will ever happen.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.