Quotes About Imagination

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. Still

The thing about a story is that you dream it is 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

The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself.

Imagination was a killer.

Just because it never happened doesn't mean it isn't true.

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.

The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories. Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

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.

I'm young an happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.

I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Hurwood nodded. "We're not really in Florida now—or not particularly, anyway, not Florida any more than we're in every other place.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform.

Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn't the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia, you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes...

We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn't have things to do like people in the city. We couldn't catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We'd walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers.

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

Mi always thought of him as living in a body one size smaller than his being - part of him always rushing forward beyond the rest of him, leaving part of him behind. [...] Skin-tight, expressionless - and your self made up of dreams and stories - Boy Carlton - Boy Balfour - Boy Hannay. I know all your heroes, my dear one - I gave you the books in which you found them.

I don't know how or why I had decided Mrs. Maddox must be a blonde - but a state of mind that produces scenarios filled with Octogenarian Lovers! and Socialites Programmed for Attack! can hardly be held responsible for the triteness of its imagery.

Cruelty was fear in disguise and nothing more. And hadn't one of Japeth's holy strangers said that fear itself was nothing more than a failure of the imagination?

Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

It's ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system-and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse.