Quotes About Imagination

All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages.

Level 4," Lachance said. "Lingerie, footwear, monsters, and beasties.

Oh man," Powell said, laughing in disbelief. "Do they fire lightning out of their asses, too? Do they cum nuclear jelly? What else, huh?

Poetically if not geographically, the Kuria Murias belong to the same harmonious archipelago as Serendip, the Celebes, Tahiti and Taprobane, Andaman and Nicobar, the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Dogs. I had fallen in love with the name years before, in the atlas.

Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

But this too is true: stories save us.

But in a story, which is a type of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

Imagination is a killer.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

What happened, and what might have happened?

A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. That's basic psychology. I'd pulled enough night guard to know how the fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul

Stories can save us.

In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.

Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. (p 38 "Spin")

The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable--who we are, why we are--and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

That's a true story that never happened.

I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.